Writing Quotes

• When I decided to stop using quotation marks, it presented technical challenges: you have to conceive of dialogue differently and structure it differently for this to work. So I had a new problem, which makes writing interesting again.

  

  Catherine Brady
  • Interesting
  • Problem
  • Challenges

• Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.

  

  William Hazlitt
  • Men
  • Thinking
  • Lazy

• Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

  

  Stieg Larsson
  • Writing
  • Entertainment
  • Detective

• It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

  

  William Faulkner
  • Writing
  • Character
  • Move

• I love writing about unknown people.

  

  Miranda Seymour
  • People
  • Writing
  • Unknown

• It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.

  

  David Longstreth
  • People
  • Song
  • Personal

• Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

  

  Virgil Thomson
  • Style
  • Matter
  • Composer

• I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.

  

  Richard K. Morgan
  • Accused
  • Gloomy
  • Texture

• I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

  

  Chang-Rae Lee
  • War
  • Father
  • Brother

• I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.

  

  William Golding
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Mean

• Joaquin Jackson's frank and colorful account of his long career as a modern-day Texas Ranger thrills like an action novel, yet the stories are true, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always gripping. I could hardly put the book down. . . .The writing is superb.

  

  Elmer Kelton
  • Novel
  • Account
  • Gripping

• When I came out of service, the first couple of releases didn't really hit so I just took a little hiatus and sat down to see what was happening. I just glued my ears to the radio and then I started writing - the first hit record that came out was "Everybody Loves a Winner.

  

  William Bell
  • Couple
  • Records
  • Release

• The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.

  

  Eudora Welty
  • Thinking
  • Today
  • Vision

• [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
  • Thinking
  • Pleasure
  • Seven

• Whenever a songwriter writes a big hit, then the next 20 songs they write - no matter how bad they are - get recorded.

  

  Ahmet Ertegun
  • Bad
  • Song
  • Matter

• I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn't want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, "Don't be sexist!" because that's not how I talk in regular life.

  

  Boots Riley
  • Writing
  • Wanted
  • Sexist

• I look at writing as a medium of entertainment. You can get too precious about your stuff. It has to compete with everything else, like DVDs and CDs.

  

  Andy McNab
  • Writing
  • Entertainment
  • Precious

• Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day.

  

  William Allingham
  • Writing

• I honestly turned to writing because I didn't know what else to do, and because a friend had gently suggested it.

  

  Emily Susan Rapp
  • Writing
  • Friend
  • Suggested

• No doubt, there are those who believe that judges - and particularly dissenting judges - write to hear themselves say, as it were, 'I, I, I.' And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.

  

  William J. Brennan, Jr.
  • Believe
  • Doubt
  • Judging

• Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.

  

  Anneli Rufus
  • Writing
  • Alone

• Directing a movie precludes me from being involved in any greater way. But, the job was never to do more, it was always to enable. Sometimes as a producer, you're creating and writing it, or sometimes you're writing and directing it, or other times you're there from the very beginning.

  

  J. J. Abrams
  • Job
  • Movie
  • Beginning

• I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

  

  George R. R. Martin
  • Writing
  • Heart

• I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write.

  

  Wole Soyinka
  • Long
  • Morning
  • Waiting

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