Writing Quotes
-
I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
-
Writing is a very easy way for me to express myself. When I was still at school, I would write for no reason other than I wanted to write.
Matthew Nable
-
In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.
James Fenton
-
[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
-
I write about love and family a lot, because I'm always trying to figure those things out. At different points in my life, just when I think I've finished writing about it, the dynamics shift, and then I have a whole new set of questions and worries and misunderstandings to wrestle with.
Sarah Kay
-
One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.
Meg Rosoff
-
[Final diary entry:] Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.
Virginia Woolf
-
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Ernest Hemingway
-
I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world--or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out too thin. (On Writing.)
Ernest Hemingway
-
A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.
William Julius Wilson
-
Here's the beauty of a camera: you don't have to come up with words for what you're looking at... Maybe another angle is needed sometimes. When we're burned out from writing, we can photograph or draw, look at the world in a different way, and photographers could try writing what they see.
Barbara Mattes Abercrombie
-
I had been really obsessed with Jonestown for a long time - many years - and had read everything there was to read about it, seen all the footage and the documentaries. I found it really chilling in a personal way - the question of people submitting all their personal power and agency and independent thought it the name of a group or ideology. I could not find a way to write about it directly that didn't feel too heavy.
Danzy Senna
-
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
Ernest Hemingway
-
My past is very interesting, and I treasure it, but to write about it, it's just not on my radar.
Steven Siro Vai
Alcatrazz
-
I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.
Amy Bloom
-
It's difficult to write a book where a character is on virtually every page of the book but you cannot refer to his or her gender. It gets rid of every his, her, she and he.
William Lewis Trogdon
-
One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
Daniil Kharms
-
When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.
Paul Auster
-
I was always worried about the dishonesty and meretriciousness that often accompanies ego. So I tried to make the memoir as factual and accurate and as unemotional as I could, and let readers make their own judgments on what happened. And, in fact, that's how I write poetry. I'm trying to present the reader with the experience itself, not with my commentary on it. So I adopted a style that I'd hoped would let me accomplish that.
Dan Burt
-
When everything works best, it's not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It's when you're mad with it, it's when it's stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It's when there's no hope but that.
Charles Bukowski
-
Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.
Marjane Satrapi
-
George Orwell is a pinnacle writer, for his combination of moral insight and literary writing.
Atul Gawande
