Writing Quotes
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Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.
Raymond Chandler
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If I believe in anything when it comes to writing, and I can't stress enough that I detest writing, it's something that sticks with me not from any English class but from some awfully recondite driver's ed. seminars I had the privilege to audit during my mid-teens, and to this day I probably misunderstand it anyway. It's the term "right of way."
Gary Lutz
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I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it.
Adam Schlesinger
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The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs'.
Roy Blount, Jr.
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When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt.
Clive Cussler
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The books you read as a young person are books that stay with you forever. I think that is the biggest privilege of writing for young people. You feel like you can help shape somebody.
Jenny Han
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I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band. I would like to be paid like a plumber. I do the job and you pay me what it's worth.
Steve Albini
Big Black
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My first novel is loaded with food references largely because my cupboards were bare, and I was writing hungry.
Jan Karon
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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
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My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.
Meg Rosoff
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I think women need to hear more encouragement in any field, because I see it - I teach creative writing. And even though it's mostly women in the room, they're not often - or they didn't used to be the ones who went on to publish books. I know this sounds like a tautology, but encouragement is the key.
Eileen Pollack
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I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'
Kim Edwards
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Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press.
Lynn Coady
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In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Cesare Pavese
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What Malcolm X did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named - a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity.
Manning Marable
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I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.
Sandra Cisneros
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I pay attention to the actors and stuff, but not even that much. I don't pay attention to who's writing.
Jason Mewes
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What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
Ernest Hemingway
