Writing Quotes

• I started out in life as a poet, I was only writing poetry all through my 20s, it wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them.

  

  Paul Auster
  • Reading
  • Serious
  • Poet

• I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

  

  Steve Martin
  • Thinking
  • Moments
  • Publishing

• Maybe someone's who's a different kind of writer [would think otherwise] - someone who'd be just as comfortable writing essays on what their novels are about. Sometimes you feel like certain novelists are like that.

  

  Chang-Rae Lee
  • Different
  • Thinking
  • Writing

• Write what's up there." Sister Ignatius pointed at her temple. "As a great man once said, this is a secret garden. We've all got one of those." "Jesus?" "No, Bruce Springsteen.

  

  Cecelia Ahern
  • Men
  • Writing
  • Garden

• No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.

  

  Steve Martin
  • People
  • Book
  • Audience

• It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.

  

  Carrie Brownstein
  • Writing
  • Sometimes

• I don't think I'm a great actress. I think I can act or I can react. Coming from a musical background and being a dramatic singer and writer, when I write stuff I really feel it. So I sing it like it comes from here. That's how I do the acting.

  

  Dolly Parton
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Musical

• I spend months, sometimes years, doing what I call dreamtime, weaving it together inside my head. But when I actually feel that the egg of my story is ready to hatch, then I can write it in three months. Then I know the landscape and the people well and from the inside, but I don't necessarily know where the story is going to take us.

  

  Michael Morpurgo
  • People
  • Together
  • Sometimes

• Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

  

  Eudora Welty
  • Writing
  • Stories
  • Afterwards

• Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.

  

  Stephen Sondheim
  • Reason
  • Enough
  • Obligation

• I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.

  

  Sara Gruen
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Reading

• Twitter actually may be improving its users’ writing, as it forces them to wring meaning from fewer letters - it embodies William Strunk’s famous dictum, Omit needless words, at the keystroke level.

  

  Christian Rudder
  • Writing
  • Twitter
  • Improving

• Whatever I write I publish. Because that's where the money is.

  

  Michael Ian Black
  • Writing
  • Publish

• In order for you to be yourself, you have to be somebody first.

  

  Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
  • Writing
  • Firsts
  • Order

• I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

  

  Sue Grafton
  • Writing
  • Novel

• Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

  

  Carlos J. Cortes
  • Writing
  • Loses

• Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Men
  • Dreamer
  • Monsters

• I write what I write, say what I say, 'cause I feel what I feel, and if I did it different, it would make me a liar! So I'd rather be an honest person than a good liar.

  

  Dolly Parton
  • Different
  • Writing
  • Liars

• Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.

  

  Sue Grafton
  • Writing
  • Sometimes

• It's just hard when you've spent so much time on something, writing and recording, laying the vocals, getting the hook right, getting the beat right, making everything sound right - you spent a freaking week trying to make it sound perfect, and someone comes along and shoots it down.

  

  Marshall Bruce Mathers III Bad Meets Evil'
  • Writing
  • Trying
  • Perfect

• I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.

  

  Alice Mattison
  • Thinking
  • Remember
  • Editors

• I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

  

  Lisa Lutz
  • Writing

• Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

  

  Terry Eagleton
  • Hands
  • Communication
  • Consciousness

• You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

  

  Ray Bradbury
  • Way
  • Waiting
  • Stories

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