Writing Quotes
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You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.
Anthony F. C. Wallace
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Learn your instrument. Be honest. Don't do anything phony. There is so much crap floating around. There is plenty of room for a bit of honest writing.
Christine McVie
Fleetwood Mac
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My wife gave me a year to start making money out of writing, and after six months, I'd made not a bean. Suddenly, the books took off, and the beans started coming in!
Jonathan Stroud
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When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'
Eleanor Catton
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Once I've written a song, I sometimes refine them.
Roger McGuinn
The Byrds
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Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.
Janet Malcolm
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For me, the hardest part is getting up and writing, that's the hard part. I always felt like I could teach someone to direct if I really had to. I feel like it's a skill that's passable, but writing... writing is the worst. That's what I'm doing right now, it's just the hardest thing that you'll ever do.
Ben Younger
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I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.
Jerry Spinelli
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When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.
Curtis Sittenfeld
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I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
Andre Dubus III
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My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
Laurence Housman
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Whatever be the motives which induce men to write,--whether avarice or fame,--the country becomes more wise and happy in which they most serve for instructors.
Oliver Goldsmith
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If someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him.
Keith Green
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Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,-Will write my story for my better self,As when you paint your portrait for a friend,Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at itLong after he has ceased to love you, justTo hold together what he was and is.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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I thought people cared about music in a deep way, so I was writing to that spirit in people and in myself. It was me, thinking I knew what was up. Youth, who else can change the world?
Kevin Eubanks
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When you are writing and directing and producing, there is a lot of stuff to do. I like to finish one; then while I am editing, I will think of the next one.
John Hamburg