Writing Quotes
-
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.
C. S. Lewis
-
Don't wait for success, but for the respect and interest of those who read you. At the start it could be a classmate, someone who shares your interests. Before sending off the manuscript for a novel to a publishing house, it would be a good idea to try writing short stories, and publishing them in a local magazine.
Dacia Maraini
-
In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.
Constance Baker Motley
-
I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear.
John Sladek
-
If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
David Nicholls
-
When I'm sitting at the desk not being able to write line one, it's silence and despair! It's not so easy to put the pen to the legal pad or type the first sentence on the computer screen.
Erica Jong
-
Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.
Gail Godwin
-
When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.
Lynn Coady
-
Being a rock musician is already like ego-tripping hardcore. You're self-consumed, and you're always thinking. It's really easy to say, "I'm going to write a song about this situation, and when I'm done, everyone will care." To everybody else, that's ego-tripping.
Ryan Adams
-
People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" . . . The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry.
M. F. K. Fisher
-
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Marguerite Young
-
Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.
Boyd Holbrook
-
Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
Marilynne Robinson
-
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.
Flannery O'Connor
-
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
Virginia Woolf
-
If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.
Jenny Lewis
-
I had a very normal, very typical American childhood. My father worked for the government at the Pentagon and my mother was an educator, so we had a very average upbringing, but that's helped me in my writing because I'm writing about ordinary things.
Jeff Kinney
-
I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.
David Biespiel
-
Swing your partner, dosey-do, now clap your hands... uh-oh, that's all the square dance moves I know... I'll bluff the rest. Slap your partner in the face, Write bad checks all over the place, Flirt with strangers, annoy your spouse, Get a divorce and lose your house, ...uh... dosey-do.
Scott Adams
-
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Ken Kesey
-
My writing philosophy is throwing spaghetti against the wall. That's how I take pictures, too. If I take 100, surely one will be good.
Amanda Peet
-
I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.
Katherine Paterson
