Writing Quotes
-
Writing is linear and sequential; Sentence B must follow Sentence A, and Sentence C must follow Sentence B, and eventually you get to Sentence Z. The hard part of writing isn't the writing; it's the thinking. You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: What does the reader need to know next?
William Zinsser
-
Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery. In writing, for the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.
William Stafford
-
All the characters on the album are inside me, though none are me. They are sides of me or who I was.
David Berman
-
I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.
Ashwin Sanghi
-
Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start.
John Grisham
-
I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.
Lois McMaster
-
I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.
Judy Blume
-
In terms of whether I use humor to allow me or my readers to come up for air, I don't think I put that much thought into it. I hate to say it, but I first have to entertain myself before I can think about the reader. I know that's kind of weird and selfish, but I write because it's fun, not because I need to put bread on the table.
Daniel Olivas
-
And I do pay a lot of attention to how things feel underneath my feet. It's a way of transporting yourself somewhere that you're trying to write about - closing your eyes and imagining what it feels like to literally be in that space. Maybe because of this weird aura thing I find it a bit easier to put my body in an imaginary space.
Evie Wyld
-
At first I had no skills in writing comedy. I didn't know what a joke was, but, as someone once told me, your emotions follow your intent. If you create the intention of starting a comedy act, slowly your mind starts adjusting and you arrive at a new emotional state.
Steve Martin
-
I think it's probably true that creative people are touched by melancholy more than the average person, and to the extent that delving into that shadow world produces good work, I'm all for it. But I think you have to be able to step back from the work, and say, "Look how miserable I felt. Look how beautifully I wrote about it. Now I'm going to get an iced coffee and chat with a friend." Writing should be a way out of despair.
David Starkey
-
A lot of my words come to me when I'm out and about as well, riding the bus or sat in the pub. I went through a stage of going to a strip bar called the White Horse at lunch times and did a lot of writing in there. They were fine with that but I don't know how they would feel about me setting up the easel.
Danny Fox
-
I really work for racial reconciliation in many ways. And you can judge me by my writings.
David Duke
-
Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.
Susan Wiggs
-
I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.
Vivienne Westwood
-
I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
John Lanchester
-
I'm always writing new songs and doing them live, and I may do it for a week or two, and then never do it again.
Bob Schneider
-
For me, a lot of Discipline was very personal writing, like writing through and working out being inside this gendered body and also the compulsions of the body, the muting of the mind as driven by the body. My father had died some years ago so he haunts the book too, just floats through it ghost-like. But, the writing of every book is different for me. They are so like living creatures, these books, so I don't know what's carried over into the writing of the next things - except maybe that I'm best when I make my writing practice a routine.
Dawn Lundy Martin
-
Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts; but to write or speak with propriety and simplicity is a more difficult task. Thus it is easy to affect a pompous style, to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express; it is not so easy to pitch upon the very word that exactly fits it.
William Hazlitt
-
Hollywood does not write parts for people like me, an elderly gentleman, and when they find out you're crippled, forget about it. No, I'll never work again.
Ricardo Montalban
-
Tanya Ward Goodman, writing with a big heart, clear eyes, and a light touch, allows us a privileged glimpse into the shabby, enchanted world of traveling carnivals, roadside attractions, and a beloved, eccentric father’s descent into Alzheimers. Just as her dad animated the handcarved, miniature western world of Tinkertown from coat hangers, inner tubes and old sewing machine motors, Tanya Ward Goodman has fashioned her complex and often hilarious memories into a beguiling, wry, and moving work of art.
Michelle Huneven
-
From a guitar player's point of view it's generally harder writing parts to songs than finding a part to base a song on.
Jon Klein
Siouxsie and the Banshees
