Writing Quotes
-
I don't force it. If you don't have an idea and you don't hear anything going over and over in your head, don't sit down and try to write a song. You know, go mow the lawn...My songs speak for themselves.
Neil Young Buffalo Springfield
-
Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P. D. James
-
Being a producer is a very different experience than writing my own songs.
Mark Hoppus Blink-182
-
I left things out - my motivations, my history, my emotional responses - because I am not good at understanding them or writing about them. I tried and it was generally boring and always unconvincing. Most importantly I wanted to try to place Afghans and Afghanistan in the foreground rather than my own character.
Rory Stewart
-
I have the most fun writing and directing. And I always choose myself as the lead actor.
Isabella Rossellini
-
Don’t ever stop writing. This is the way the world will find out who you are.
Roger Jon Ellory
-
I'm writing new music all the time. I'm just not writing pop stuff. It's not my goal.
Billy Joel
-
I don't enjoy writing newspaper articles any more than people like reading them. I'm a standup comic, not a journalist, although sometimes onstage I will say: 'What else is in the news?' Writing is work, which I'm not comfortable with.
Andy Kindler
-
What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.
Jim Harrison
-
I have this thing about my own voice on record. No matter what I sing, it sounds really serious, and I sound self loathing or whatever, which was just driving me nuts because that's not what I was writing.
Thomas Edward Yorke Atoms for Peace
-
I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
Jason Katims
-
The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.
Ernest Hemingway
-
Children should learn to draw as they learn to write, and such a mystery should not be made of it. They should be encouraged, not flattered... then [later in life] double the effort is required to get the facility which might have been gained insensibly.
William Morris Hunt
-
Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It's taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we'll see whatever happens with that.
Ethan Suplee
-
Writing screenplays makes me a better musician because it clears my head. After writing a movie, I go running back to music as fast as I can.
Nick Cave The Birthday Party
-
I've done shows with orchestras, and I like writing with orchestras.
Bryan Ferry Roxy Music
-
Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love And sing them loud even in the dead of night.
William Shakespeare
-
One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.
John Podhoretz
-
Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
-
I set writing aside when I went into theater, and then I set theater aside and subsequently had about a 25-year career in software development. Which, by the way, is a very creative field. I equate it more to kinetic sculpture than anything else, as an activity.
David Wroblewski
-
Good writing is everything.
Corey Stoll
-
When you ask me to sign your NDA, you're basically saying, in writing, that you don't trust me.
Anil Dash
-
This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
-
I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong