Writing Quotes

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Derek Walcott
- Writing
Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.

Bette Midler
- People
- Country
- Book

Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.

William Butler Yeats
- Thinking
- Important
- Book
I studied arranging and orchestration a number of years ago, so I have a home studio and arrange about three-fourths of my songs on the computer. Since writing orchestration is tedious, I often put an arrangement on the keyboard and let someone better-qualified finish it.

Brian Stokes Mitchell
- Writing
- Home
These entrepreneurs were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.

Alain de Botton
- Writing
- Business
My expectations for myself were never high. I had a very unusual way of writing songs and of thinking about music. I wasn't at all like Bob Dylan or Simon and Garfunkel. I was completely different - I didn't have a David Geffen at my side.

Don McLean
- Music
- Different
- Thinking
There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

A. S. Byatt
- School
- Words
- Artist
The art of the three-minute song is more like journalism than writing a big 400-page book. You want to be brief, you want to make sense right yen and there. And sometimes that takes a bit of work.

Buffy Sainte-Marie
- Work
- Art
- Book