Writing Quotes

• coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.

  

  David Mermin
  • Should
  • Discipline
  • Failing

• I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'

  

  Lorrie Moore
  • People
  • Writing

• You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

  

  Susan Orlean
  • Writing
  • Love
  • Remind

• To write is to inform against others.

  

  Violette Leduc
  • Writing

• When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.

  

  Morgan Neville
  • People
  • Thinking
  • Character

• You care a lot about these stories you're writing, and you hope that someone else will care, too.

  

  Ryan North
  • Writing
  • Stories
  • Someone

• If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering . . . then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?

  

  Carole Maso
  • Desire
  • Suffering
  • Language

• To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

  

  William Gibson
  • World
  • Writing
  • Real

• So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.

  

  Brit Marling
  • Writing
  • Women
  • Meaningful

• I started writing music in a French way: more focused on lyrics than melody.

  

  Benjamin Clementine
  • Music
  • Writing
  • Lyrics

• I always write as I like to write, and I've been thinking about it because I honestly didn't realize how different my stuff is, until I started looking at other people's scripts as a producer.

  

  William Monahan
  • People
  • Different
  • Realizing

• I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.

  

  Ernest Hemingway
  • School
  • Missing
  • Criticism

• I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.

  

  Elizabeth Strout
  • Writing
  • Light
  • Personality

• I went to college in North Carolina, and that's how I learned how to play music. I learned how to play guitar when I was 12, and I was always in bands, but the first time I ever started writing my own music was being surrounded by a lot of songwriter friends in North Carolina.

  

  Nicole Atkins
  • Writing
  • College

• Depending upon shock tactics is easy, whereas writing a good play is difficult. Pubic hair is no substitute for wit.

  

  J. B. Priestley
  • Good
  • Play
  • Hair

• The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer.

  

  Russell Banks
  • Writing
  • Program
  • Apprenticeship

• I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.

  

  Philip Glass
  • People
  • Life
  • Music

• There's nothing personal in it THE SKRIKER. I'm not ever inclined with any of the plays to say, This is about that, because plays are about the whole event that they are. . . . I was certainly wanting to write a play about damage - damage to nature and damage to people, both of which there's plenty of about. To that extent, I was writing a play about England now.

  

  Caryl Churchill
  • People
  • Damage
  • Plenty

• Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • World
  • Light
  • Paper

• I have ten thousand memories of myself writing alone in basements, bizarre servant quarters, cemeteries, deserted fountains, the band van, and other awkward settings.

  

  Josh Malerman
  • Writing
  • Memories
  • Settings

• 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
  • Time
  • Believe
  • Writing

• I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

  

  Alan Furst
  • Writing
  • Beginning

• And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.

  

  Russell Banks
  • Reading
  • Desire
  • Clever

• I love writing about unknown people.

  

  Miranda Seymour
  • People
  • Writing
  • Unknown

1

...

401

402

403

404

405

...

462

previous

next