Writing Quotes

• I'd love to write full time. But it's not something that is due to me because I'm a writer. Times are very hard for doing the thing you love, but the payoff for not having much money is that you love your job. A balance would be good. But yes, given infinite funds, or a guaranteed regular income of some kind, I'd happily shut myself away and write stories for the rest of what I've got in me.

  

  Evie Wyld
  • Kind
  • Balance
  • Infinite

• I wrote in coffee shops in Japan when I was 22, 23, before I had the stamina to sit down and write. I liked the buzzy environment; I couldn't speak Japanese when I arrived, so it was kind of a white noise. It felt more sociable than being alone, but now, as I've developed a writing practice, I couldn't do it.

  

  Susan Barker
  • Writing
  • Noise
  • Coffee Shop

• It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.

  

  Virginia Woolf
  • House
  • Spring
  • Building

• For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

  

  Ernest Hemingway
  • Trying
  • Done
  • Luck

• The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

  

  Paul de Man
  • Writing
  • Nature
  • Process

• 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 wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

  

  Chang-Rae Lee
  • Writing
  • War
  • Korean

• I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.

  

  Haruki Murakami
  • Work
  • Concentrate
  • Desk

• I'm finding writing very fascinating.

  

  Eve Arden
  • Writing
  • Fascinating

• I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

  

  Wole Soyinka
  • School
  • Art
  • Moments

• The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.

  

  Ezra Pound
  • Child
  • Literature
  • Doctor

• The process of writing a novel is getting to know more about the novel until you know everything about it. And it's been described as a kind of dreamlike state where you're letting the novel make its own shape, and you're putting into it the pleasure of creation, which is intoxicating.

  

  Martin Amis
  • Writing

• Since my tour (in Japan) just finished, I started writing songs. I was inspired a lot while on the road and I have a lot to say and feel. I want to process those and write it down on paper and put my hands on the keyboard before they become the past.

  

  Angela Aki
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Tour

• Writing from a character is really fun - sometimes you can be more honest through somebody else's perspective.

  

  Willy Mason
  • Character
  • Sometimes
  • Honest

• I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

  

  Erica Jong
  • World
  • War
  • Hate

• At one point, I just decided that it might be more creatively rewarding to put my time into writing on stuff that I could really be proud of rather than trying to get a one-episode part on 'Modern Family' or something.

  

  Paul Rust
  • Writing
  • Proud
  • Rewarding

• So the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.

  

  Daniel Kehlmann
  • Thinking
  • Character
  • Mean

• One thing that I don't ever want to do is write something I don't love.

  

  Danielle Trussoni
  • Writing
  • Want
  • One Thing

• Writing is a passion and when things happen in my life, I write a lot. It’s a form of therapy.

  

  Una Healy
  • Writing
  • Passion
  • Therapy

• If you write a bunch of different characters with a bunch of different opinions, you end up with these long scenes of everyone standing around talking.

  

  Michael Arndt
  • Different
  • Long
  • Character

• The challenge in writing the songs for The Aristocats truly fell on the animators & director of the film. Robert & I wrote the initial songs for the film, just prior to leaving full-time employment at the Walt Disney Studios. Therefore, some of the songs we wrote for The Aristocats were never used. I believe, therefore, the challenge fell upon the makers of the film to select what songs made the final cut.

  

  Richard Sherman
  • Believe
  • Song
  • Challenges

• What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!

  

  John Fogerty Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Real
  • Song
  • Band

• Freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they have, or the views they express, or the words they speak or write.

  

  Hugo Black
  • People
  • Freedom
  • Mean

• Stand-up life is really hard. At one point, I got so paralyzed I could write five screenplays before I could write three jokes for stand-up. Later, I've finally allowed myself to relax quite a bit, to think I can do it because I've done it in the past. The pressure to come up with the material is the same but the anxiety about whether I can do it is gone.

  

  Steve Martin
  • Thinking
  • Past
  • Anxiety

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