Writing Quotes

• Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

  

  Patrick Modiano
  • Different
  • Important
  • Strong

• If you've seen 'Spirited Away', 'Spirited Away' is set in a very, very Japanese sensibility. And so, to Japanese audiences, when Sen would walk up, the main character, and look at this big building with a flag on it with Japanese writing on it, everyone in Japan would know what that is.

  

  John Lasseter
  • Up
  • Character
  • Japanese

• There have always been jokes all over our songs; I originally started writing lyrics to make my friends crack a smile, which is difficult.

  

  Alexander David Turner Arctic Monkeys
  • Song
  • Difficult
  • Jokes

• Writers who sit down and write might judge what they're putting down, but I always just try to barf it out. I'm writing crap, but I'll put it down.

  

  Kay Cannon
  • Writing
  • Judge

• The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written.

  

  Zachary Cole Smith
  • Music
  • Words
  • Drawing

• Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.

  

  George Murray
  • Writing
  • Poetry

• 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
  • Women
  • Political
  • Joy

• When my story stalls on me, I've played my hand too soon.

  

  T. Jefferson Parker
  • Hand
  • Stories
  • Hands

• For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.

  

  Elif Safak
  • God
  • Feeling
  • Universe

• Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

  

  Mick Jagger The Rolling Stones
  • Time
  • Song
  • Lyrics

• No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • Business
  • Couple
  • Sacrifice

• I was writing rap at 12 years old and began writing songs as a 20-year-old. I think I wrote my first song in the winter of 2008-2009, when I was in Buenos Aires. I was writing about growing up and my boys back home.

  

  Lukas Forchhammer Lukas Graham
  • Up
  • Home
  • Song

• They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.

  

  Kevin Kwan
  • Writing
  • Truth

• I love being in the studio, and I am a huge fan of live music. Without writing good stuff in the studio, you have nothing to play live.

  

  Anthony Hamilton
  • Good
  • Music
  • Live

• If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn't know how to live. It's your best friend.

  

  Mirriam Johnson
  • Writing
  • Live
  • Friend

• I was working my first adult job, a quasi journalistic job, writing content for a website. In the offices, we had banks of TVs, papers, a constant media stream, which was unusual for 2001.

  

  Garth Risk Hallberg
  • Writing
  • Job
  • Media

• For me, writing something down was the only road out.

  

  Anne Tyler
  • Writing
  • Road

• In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time.

  

  Dave Morris
  • Time
  • Good
  • Writing

• I've never really suffered complete and utter writer's block, really. I equate it with sex: in the beginning of my career, I was writing five songs a week; now, I occasionally write a song. But it's an exciting moment when it happens!

  

  Loudon Wainwright III
  • Career
  • Song
  • Beginning

• Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn't so good at that.

  

  Dave Eggers
  • Time
  • Good
  • Important

• One of the things I find in writing about people who are dead is that, after a short or long time, no matter how close the relationship was, they become like characters in fiction.

  

  Michael Lindsay-Hogg
  • Long
  • Character
  • Fiction

• I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

  

  Alice Mattison
  • Persons
  • Pieces
  • Memoir

• It's something you can actually control. With writing, it feels like it's given to you, and when the good stuff hits, it feels like it's coming from some other planet.And you're just channeling it.

  

  Donald Miller
  • Good
  • Control
  • Stuff

• criticizing the Cambridge School of criticism, e.g. John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read, 'Fine Writing,' pp. 306-307

  

  Logan Pearsall Smith
  • Writing
  • School
  • Criticism

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