Writing Quotes
-
My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.
C. K. Williams
-
Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.
Lynn Nottage
-
Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.
David Farr
-
The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.
James Mercer
Broken Bells
-
You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
Ernest Hemingway
-
Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.
James Rollins
-
I write something that I believe I've made up, and it's only when a friend later points it out to me that I realise I've been writing about myself again.
Jo Nesbo
-
My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.
Bret Stephens
-
There's one thing I know for sure: When I'm most opinionated, my writing sucks.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
-
I was writing before I met Rick and actually I created the band before Rick Finch. Basically, the first album, I wrote. Who's to say what would've happened? Rick was very talented too.
Harry Wayne Casey
KC and the Sunshine Band
-
For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.
Darryl Pinckney
-
If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy.
Seth Godin
-
When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.
Daniel Handler
-
Never write about a place until you're away from it, because it gives you perspective. Immediately after you've seen something you can give a photographic description of it and make it accurate. That's good practice, but it isn't creative writing.
Ernest Hemingway
-
I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.
John Irving
-
I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.
Jami Attenberg
-
Music is my work, writing songs is my work, touring is my work, going into the studio is my work.
Burning Spear
-
Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.
Edwidge Danticat
-
The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.
Adora Svitak
-
My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
Alexander Chee
-
I never thought it was unusual to write, and I've been writing or pretending to write since before I even started school.
Ellen Gilchrist
-
My passion is writing, but it is also a fight because I still see home as a woman's duty.
Angeles Mastretta
