Writing Quotes
-
I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.
-
People didn't like me; I was loud and aggressive. People can take it from a 42-year-old, but when you're a little kid, and people are like, 'You're loud and awful,' you think, 'I guess I am awful,' so writing and figuring out how to put things into words was the way I felt better.
-
We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
-
When I went to school, I was already reading and writing. In fact, I was offended that the other kids couldn't.
-
I always thought I was going to be an artist. All I ever did was draw. I only ever turned to writing because I couldn't find somebody to write the kind of stuff I wanted to do. That just spiraled out of control.
-
Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.
-
Don't try to write what other people are writing - write what is true to you.
-
I finally realized that my relaxation is practicing the piano and writing. I've tried to do other things, but I've learned through the decades, that this is what I enjoy, practicing music and writing.
-
I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
-
Someone's writing down your mistakes, someone's documenting your downfall.
-
Writing is such a singular and lonely occupation. And it's interesting; all of the work that you create is so singular.
-
For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
-
Any experience that isn't fun is probably something I will at least use in my writing someday.
-
It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.
-
The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.
-
I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.
-
I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home.
-
Writers throughout the ages have one weapon, which is literature, but they also have their responsibilities as a citizen when literature does not seem to suffice. I mean, they are not mutually exclusive. One continues to write anyway but if you are called out to demonstrate, if people are being killed in the streets, it's hardly the moment to go for your pen and paper, you know, help in one way or the other.
-
Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
-
After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There's something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.
-
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.
-
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
-
The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.
-
I teach a lot of graduate creative writing classes, and on the first day, I like to go around the room and ask everybody what's the last book you've read that you really loved. And all of the women tend to give me chick lit titles. And to me, that's sort of disappointing because it's their only exposure to fiction somehow.
