Top 100 A Writing Quotes
#1. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.
Steve Coogan
#2. I'm not a writer with a drinking problem, I'm a drinker with a writing problem.
Dorothy Parker
#3. If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.
Julia Cameron
#4. A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
Joseph Conrad
#5. Alice: Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Hatter: I haven't the faintest idea.
Lewis Carroll
#6. The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. but what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
Charles Bukowski
#7. There is a necessary gestation period during which a writer should protect his work, because the minute he sends it out, or joins a writing group, or enrolls in an MFA program, he engages the part of himself that is focused on the result more than the work. For
Betsy Lerner
#8. Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.
Jim Crace
#9. Here's a writing craft tool that you can remove from your toolbox and throw away: description. It's the stuff that most readers skim. Even when deftly done using the five senses it's a lead weight. It isn't needed anymore.
Donald Maass
#10. Each time you sit down to write, you should cleanse your linguistic palate by reading some things that are vastly unlike what you've been writing. As a warm-up activity, you might try actively imitating a writing style different from your own. It's hard to do and highly unpriming.
Michael Erard
#11. A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#12. I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately, I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours. I do like to write in the morning. I start after breakfast, like 9 o'clock, and I'll write till lunch, about 1. And after lunch, I just have fun.
Eve Bunting
#13. My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.
Sue Townsend
#14. The structure of a 'writing schedule' is only there as a frame. You provide the image, the emotion, and the sentiment in your own time.
Margaret Aranda
#15. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Will Self
#16. To my mind, the most important thing in any form of fiction is the human element, but only if it takes us beyond the everyday, into situations that examine the complexities that may fascinate or puzzle us. To dwell on the mundane as some kind of a writing exeercise is useless.
Graham Worthington
#18. It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.
Rachel Cusk
#19. If we are invested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product.
Julia Cameron
#20. The "executive producer" title either means that you're the person who created, or co-created, the show, or you're the person who's in charge of day-to-day operations. Whereas "producer" is often just a writing credit.
Mitchell Hurwitz
#21. When I talk about a writing life, I'm talking about a life in which writing is the dominant response to living.
Julia Cameron
#22. You can't think yourself out of a writing block; you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.
John Rogers
#23. When you have a writing partner and you're writing a comedy, your goal is to make each other laugh.
Lauren Miller
#24. Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn't want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.
John Amos
#25. If you haven't taken a writing class, take a writing class. I took every class that was available in my area. I went to conferences inside and outside my area to network with people. That's how I got my agent. I found my agent through another agent who was at a conference.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#26. I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.
Anne McCaffrey
#29. That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find something, something you should not have found ...
Martine Bailey
#30. The author sees Luke's loyalty to the apostle Paul "depicted architecturally in the great church at Rome known as St. Paul Outside the Walls. There, a statue of Luke holding a writing stylus commemorates not only his work as a Gospel author but his faithfulness to Paul.
Bryan Litfin
#31. I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.
J.D. Salinger
#32. There isn't a thought or feeling that doesn't alter or deepen when written. We are a writing animal. That is why all of us feel we have a book inside us. It isn't an illusion. We have got a book inside us.
Carol Bly
#33. Every promise of Scripture is a writing of God, which may be pleaded before Him with this reasonable request, 'Do as Thou hast said.' The Heavenly Father will not break His Word to His own child.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#34. I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write ... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.
Jonathan Maberry
#35. I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
Etgar Keret
#36. Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.
Noel Redding
#37. I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample.
Janice Dickinson
#38. I'm a poor artist. Through brute force, I brought myself up to mediocre. I've never taken a writing class, but I can write okay.
Scott Adams
#39. You want to hear a riddle, you say? I know a very good one. It begins, why is a raven like a writing desk?'
She lifted her chin. 'Have you gone mad, Hatta? I can't seem to tell.'
'They are both so full of poetry, you see. Darkness and whimsy, nightmares and song.
Marissa Meyer
#41. Write even when the world is chaotic. You don't need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.
Cory Doctorow
#42. Mad Hatter: "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied: "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter
Lewis Carroll
#43. I wrote small stories here and there, then bigger ones. Some were even written for money. I signed up for a writing class and snuck my first assignment on a yellow legal pad in a partner's office while he read through my memo.
Rachel Sklar
#44. I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.
Tobias Wolff
#45. Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.
Virgil Thomson
#46. When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.
Deborah Copaken Kogan
#47. You don't teach information in a writing workshop.
Tobias Wolff
#48. There's a need to perfect things in a writers' room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It's a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.
Louis C.K.
#49. Through Twitter, I've got a writing career and a directing career, as well as hundreds of other beneficial things that have happened to me. I love it.
Peter Serafinowicz
#50. It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.
Cynthia Voigt
#51. After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
Iris Chang
#52. One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.
Jeff VanderMeer
#53. I have acting technique; I have singing technique; I don't have a writing technique to fall back on.
Jane Lynch
#54. Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling.
Garry Disher
#55. I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
[Writer's Digest, September 1961]
Harper Lee
#56. But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject.
Philip Gerard
#57. Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
Anne Lamott
#58. The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre.
Sandra Cisneros
#59. For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
Cynthia Leitich Smith
#60. When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.
David Rakoff
#61. The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves.
Derrick Jensen
#62. I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.
Claire Messud
#63. I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.
Zoe Kazan
#64. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
Harold Bloom
#65. I've always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It's always been a passion of mine.
Zoe Lister-Jones
#66. There is a difference between a poem and a writing incrusted with a feel of Poetry to fall within range
Mpho Leteng
#68. I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
Doris Lessing
#69. Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.
Elizabeth Rusch
#70. I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.
Anthony Marra
#71. If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.
Giovanni Ribisi
#72. I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#74. As for developing a writing style'I would say that I tried to copy the pacing of the old movies I loved as a kid.
Kola Boof
#75. Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.
Jesse Kellerman
#76. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. The definition of a writing career, is write a book, write another book, write another book
Holly Lisle
#78. I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am.
Erica Jong
#79. A pure heart is perhaps one which has no natural propulsion towards anything in any manner whatsoever. When in its extreme simplicity such a heart has become like a writing-tablet beautifully smoothed and polished, God comes to dwell in it and writes there His own laws.
Maximus The Confessor
#80. Some of my favorite poets had a tremendous sense of whimsy, so it's a writing style I guess I admire.
Jewel
#81. It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself.
Amy Hempel
#82. I believe that improvisation is really just a directorial tool. It's a writing tool. It's not so much that the actors get to say whatever they want, whatever pops into their head. It's an opportunity to write the last draft of the screenplay as you're working on it.
Ivan Reitman
#83. All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.
Roy Peter Clark
#84. You care enough, that you want your life to be fulfilled in a living way, not in a painting way, not in a writing way ... you really do want it to be involving in living, corresponding with other living objects, moving, changing, that kind of thing.
Edie Sedgwick
#85. A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
Marcus Garvey
#86. I almost drowned in a hot tub at a writing workshop once after I had some drinks without accounting for how the high elevation would impact my tolerance.
Tim Pratt
#87. Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.
Terry Pratchett
#88. There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.
James Taylor
#89. I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.
Noah Baumbach
#90. I'm just not in a writing mood, but I keep going. What if the garbage man were not in a garbage mood? or the doctor not in a healing mood?
Jean Nicole Rivers
#91. I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world.
Mother Teresa
#92. Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.
Peter Jackson
#93. I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.
Margo Lanagan
#94. I have a writing addiction.
Prince
#95. The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.
Peter Gould
#96. At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
Bernard Cornwell
#97. With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
Amish Tripathi
#98. I have nothing like a writing routine. I sometimes have trouble buckling down to write at home.
Rebecca Stead
#99. My father told me when I first started that standup is exciting and I should pursue it, but that writing would be the thing that would give me power over my career. I never have to take a road gig or a writing gig I don't want because I always have the ability to play one against the other.
Greg Fitzsimmons
#100. I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.
Patricia Reilly Giff
