Writing Quotes

• I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

  

  Ben Okri
  • Life
  • Past
  • Beginning

• I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

  

  Ann Hood
  • Life
  • Time
  • Remember

• I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.

  

  Jostein Gaarder
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Sleeping

• Writing songs, that's what gets me going. Not the drugs or the sex or the rock'n'roll behaviour, it's the music.

  

  Noel Gallagher Oasis
  • Music
  • Rock
  • Sex

• The novelist must be his own most harsh critic and also his own most loving admirer and about both he must say nothing.

  

  Angus Wilson
  • Critics
  • Novelists
  • Harsh

• I was a prodigy who learned how difficult writing was only after getting published. I paid my dues later.

  

  David Quammen
  • Writing

• I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.

  

  Brian Lumley
  • Writing

• Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

  

  David Ives
  • Writing

• Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

  

  Joseph Addison
  • Writing

• It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

  

  Louise Erdrich
  • Write
  • Secret
  • Books

• I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.

  

  Jerry Garcia Grateful Dead
  • Up
  • Great
  • Today

• Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.

  

  Dave deBronkart
  • Important
  • Trust
  • Intelligent

• It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.

  

  Ben Okri
  • Important
  • Writing

• I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

  

  Eric Brown
  • Long
  • Book
  • Words

• I get melancholy if I don't [write]. I need the company of people who don't exist.

  

  William Trevor
  • People
  • Company
  • Melancholy

• Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.

  Dito Montiel
  • Writing
  • Character

• They're mostly done before we went into the studio, although I do like writing in the studio.

  

  Keith Urban
  • Writing
  • Done

• I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

  

  Michael Morpurgo
  • Writing
  • Fiction

• People talk about writing convincing teenagers like it's a really clever thing to do, but it comes incredibly naturally to me. Which, of course, is slightly a worry.

  

  Meg Rosoff
  • People
  • Worry
  • Clever

• I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.

  

  Andre Previn
  • Time
  • Great
  • Writing

• The writing was so clearly written on the wall about me, but I didn't see it. I had no role models. I didn't know there was even a possibility of being gay. I battled with it, but this was the way God made me. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the man upstairs.

  

  Bryan Batt
  • Up
  • God
  • Gay

• Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

  

  J. B. Priestley
  • Writing
  • Pregnancy

• I work hard, whether it comes to writing for my own project or another artist.

  

  Benji Hughes
  • Work
  • Writing

• You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.

  

  Loudon Wainwright III
  • Thinking
  • Trying
  • Done

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