Writing Quotes

• The idea that you could make a living from writing always thrilled me.

  

  Jane Goldman
  • Writing

• I already feel a bit annoyed at myself for writing screenplays. It's a bit, I don't know, model-singer-dancer-actress that went to a posh school. There's something too weirdly predictable about it.

  

  Emily Mortimer
  • School
  • Model
  • Annoyed

• The first thing that attracts me to any script is the writing. If I find myself becoming lost in a good yarn, then I feel certain that others will, too.

  

  Anne-Marie Duff
  • Good
  • Writing
  • Lost

• The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

  

  Anne Enright
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• I think I get certain pleasure from writing what I'm performing.

  

  Ellie Kemper
  • Writing

• I was writing this really long joke about the smell of poop, and I was like, 'What am I doing with my life?' I started to think about why I was a comedian, and then I came up with a reason for existence, which is: inserting absurdity or stupidity into strangers' lives in order to make the world a better place.

  

  Kurt Braunohler
  • Life
  • Up
  • World

• I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.

  

  Barbara Hambly
  • Long
  • Writing
  • Challenges

• If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.

  

  Octavia E. Butler
  • Single
  • Needs
  • Persistence

• Getting even is one reason for writing.

  

  William H. Gass
  • Writing
  • Reason

• Later I became very involved in writing. I really enjoyed that moment of writing. People would pass around my sentences. That was a feeling I never had before. It was like a bullet out of the gun.

  

  Ai Weiwei
  • People
  • Feeling
  • Gun

• Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry

  

  Ted Nelson
  • Learning
  • Poetry
  • Design

• It's hard to say when my interest in writing began, or how. My mother read to my sister and me every night, and we always loved playing make-believe games. I had a well-primed imagination. I didn't start thinking about writing as a serious pursuit, a career I could have, until after college.

  

  Sara Zarr
  • Thinking
  • Mother
  • Night

• Readers are not sheep, and not every pen tempts them.

  

  Vladimir Nabokov
  • Reader
  • Sheep
  • Pens

• There isn't a dearth of it, but I will confess that it's harder for me to find songs on which I'm willing to invest anything from ten to fifteen hours writing an arrangement than it was in times past.

  

  Mel Torme
  • Writing
  • Past

• If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

  

  Adele
  • Songs
  • Writer
  • Singer

• Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.

  

  Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin
  • Life
  • Music
  • Writing

• I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.

  

  Joan Collins
  • School
  • English
  • Sister

• The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands.

  

  Abdullah II of Jordan
  • World
  • Writing
  • Future

• I didn't think of myself as writing 'cli-fi,' but I'll take the label. I'll take any label that makes someone think they might be interested in my stories.

  

  Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Writing
  • Think
  • Myself

• I grew up writing songs in my room on GarageBand, and I would make the beats just out of layering my vocals over and over again. Very Imogen Heap-inspired.

  

  Ariana Grande
  • Up
  • Inspired
  • Songs

• I studied history and English in college, got a master's in writing, but I was always sort of an autodidact in science.

  

  Anthony Doerr
  • History
  • Science
  • College

• I have tried to write soundtracks, and the main problem with those was that the directors often had in their minds a much stronger sense of what they wanted to hear, than what I was willing to give them, and I guess there was no way to say, "Well why don't you write your scene around my music?" Because that's just cocky and awful.

  

  Zach Condon
  • Music
  • Why
  • Giving

• If I were writing an article for the newspaper, it would be thesis statement, information, information, supporting arguments. That would be the setup. When I'm making a documentary, the pacing of the film and the way that you sort of switch from character to character - all of those are more about storytelling than straight journalism.

  

  Marshall Curry
  • Writing
  • Character

• 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

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