Top 100 Can T Write Quotes
#1. If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.
Jez Butterworth
#2. When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can't write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs.
Michael Crichton
#3. I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.
Geoff Zanelli
#4. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
Jeff Kinney
#5. People talk differently. You can say some things some places you can't say in other places. But me as a film maker, no words are ever going to be off limits in something I write. As long as people use the words, I'm going to report that.
Dax Shepard
#6. I can't write another breakup record. That would be a real cliche.
Adele
#7. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#8. Sometimes I just want to write a really intense love scene. But I can't do that in my books for teens, or parents will complain - believe me, I've tried.
Meg Cabot
#9. Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don't write that as a sneer; there are so many of us who can't)
Graham Greene
#10. I can't write to please everyone, but someone, somewhere will be touched if I put my heart into it.
Sara Winters
#11. He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glourious parliamentary democracy
Aravind Adiga
#12. People have said to me, You can't write songs. You can't play an instrument. But I've got 10 gold records.
Sonny Bono
#13. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#14. I only write books about dead people. They can't sue.
Pierre Berton
#15. I can't write - out of all the things it takes to make music, lyrics are the thing I'm by far the shittiest at.
Jay Watson
#16. I always wanted praise, and I always wanted attention; I won't lie to you. I was a jazz critic, and that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted people to write about me, not me about them. So I thought, 'What could I do? I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't act or anything like that. OK, I can write.'
Harvey Pekar
#17. I don't have to worry about any pop sensibility. I can write adult songs, and I don't have to worry about choruses and hook lines.
John Mellencamp
#18. I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.
Patrick Duffy
#19. The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.
Glen Hansard
#20. But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#21. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
Martin Sorrell
#22. Any time I sit down at my laptop to write and I'm feeling lazy, or that I can't be bothered, or if I'm generally just lacking inspiration, I sit there and remember life with my ex-wife, and the words flow from my fingertips.
Shane K.P. O'Neill
#23. I think it's hard to really write a song that will educate someone because songs are meant to be ... you don't want to be too didactic in a song because it doesn't make for good music. And I think the role of songs can be to inspire people but there needs to education and prose to back that up.
John Legend
#24. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#25. I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.
Anthony Jeselnik
#26. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#27. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#28. That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Chuck Palahniuk
#29. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles De Lint
#30. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#31. Don't let your mouth write checks your heart can't cash,
Tom Leveen
#32. Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.
M. Night Shyamalan
#33. Nothing is ever guaranteed, but you can't write us off before you even give me a chance to prove that I can be good for you.
Molly McAdams
#34. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#35. Are you sorry? Do you wish you could do it all again and go off and write novels instead of being a teacher?
No. You can't trade what is for what might have been.
Lurlene McDaniel
#36. I like being able to donate my comedy to charity. I'm not a billionaire, and I can't write checks.
Judy Gold
#37. I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
Jason Isbell
#38. Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#39. I started off writing kind of big summer, blockbustery kinds of movies, but at that time, I had no name, nobody knew who I was, and somebody told me I can't write movies that are going to cost $100 million to make and expect someone to buy them; it was just impractical.
David Leslie Johnson
#40. Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
Robert Galbraith
#41. I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#42. Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.
Alan Furst
#43. I think I have a hard time expressing myself in my relationships. I use songs to tell people how I'm feeling. If I can't say 'I love you,' I'll write a song about it and hope that the person figures it out.
Jenny Lewis
#44. I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.
Toni Morrison
#45. If there's something that I really need to say that I can't say by speaking to someone, I usually write it in a song or a letter to someone.
Joshua Radin
#46. For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.
Neil Jordan
#47. Writer's block isn't always a problem. It can be a process of writing that helps us write better.
Jennifer Hudson Taylor
#48. I don't believe in writer's block. If I can't write, I go out and live. Then, if I'm a writer, I'll find something to write.
Peter Arpesella
#49. Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
Jonah Lehrer
#50. You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#51. If I do a bit on stage, I prepare too much. Those bits are all really, really carefully written, and overwritten, and researched. I really don't feel like I can wing it. So I write it out word for word, and when I'm onstage I'll improvise around it.
Andy Daly
#52. The only reason you can't write is because you don't.
A.A. Patawaran
#53. My dad dying was actually a reason for me to stop music properly for about a year, because he was a big supporter. All I wanted to do was write a song about him and, you know, when something's too fresh, you can't quite word it.
Gin Wigmore
#54. Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.
Jesse Jackson
#55. We can't know everything," I said quietly. "Sometimes we have to write our own future.
Denise Grover Swank
#56. I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
Kazuo Ishiguro
#57. After being diagnose as bi-polar ... I feel that laughter is the best medicine for all. I find that I can't write humorously and be depressed at the same time.
Timothy Pina
#58. I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.
Gabrielle Aplin
#59. If you can't challenge your own way of thinking, then you can't write various perspectives. The real world rarely agrees, which is also true in fiction.
G.P. Burdon
#60. I always hated...all sad songs. I thought they made happy people miserable. Now I think I understand them better. Bards write them because they can't hold them back. Sadness has got to flow out or it gets stuck and turns bitter.
Jonathan Renshaw
#61. I don't write about the same thing every time, everyday, different things are happening out there and if you take the time to look around, you can see that, then you can put it all together and tell the story.
Desmond Dekker
#62. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.
Ann Brashares
#63. I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.
Eric Whitacre
#64. I do write about people who are complex and are striving with something and can't quite get past their own stuff, which would be a proxy for myself because that's what the deal is with me.
Eric Bogosian
#65. You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.
Jane Hirshfield
#66. I can't write songs unless I am in love.
Kevin Ayers
#67. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.
Scott Berkun
#68. Don't write us off. Nobody thought we'd win the World Series in 2005, but we did. There are years when we think we're great, and we're bad. I mean, the funny thing about this game is that you can't figure it out.
Jerry Reinsdorf
#69. I think inspiration is strongest when I find a balance between observation and participation. You can't write about what it means to dance by watching from the bleachers.
Chelsey Philpot
#71. I don't care who writes a nation's laws-or crafts its advanced treaties-if I can write its economics textbooks
Paul Samuelson
#72. If someone says something unpleasant, I can't say it doesn't smart a bit. It always does. Someone can take a really nasty swipe if they want because it kind of feels powerful for a person to write in a paper and get that thing out there.
Annie Lennox
#73. If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#74. I'm such an antsy type of person. I can't write in a room without other people around. I write in coffee shops.
Paul Haggis
#75. The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.
Juan Enriquez
#76. I'm not sure that it's possible to write a novel about people who don't transgress or stumble, people who don't surprise themselves with the things they do, people who can explain all their actions with perfect logical consistency. At least it's not possible for me to write that sort of novel.
Tom Perrotta
#77. I can't do that wonderful thing that Tom Waits and Bob Dylan do - to do imagery. I'm not good at that. I just write from the heart.
Rod Stewart
#78. When I'm sick of myself, and when I don't know what to say as a solo artist, I can write a song for a movie. When I don't know where to turn musically, being in a band - Rilo Kiley or Jenny & Johnny - the collaborative nature is really exciting.
Jenny Lewis
#80. I like to write adventure stories; that's what I tell myself. But you can't help letting your own personality, your own experiences, slip through.
Mick Farren
#81. If you're asking if I would be foolish enough, or insulting enough, to write about people in my life that I respect and sell it to the masses as a "break-up song," I can't imagine doing that to people I love.
Jack White
#82. If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.
Richard Lewontin
#83. I don't know if the books are making the world a much better place. I don't write with that objective. What I know is that I see my readers creating a critical mass so we can at least understand this world in a different way.
Paulo Coelho
#84. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#85. We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don't have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.
Rachel Joyce
#86. Stop beating yourself up over all the days you didn't work on your story. Focus on what you can do today.
Sit down, and write.
M. Kirin
#87. You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.
M.J. Rose
#88. I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
#89. I don't think that TV on the Radio is some dark mysterious band that no one can know about. We write music because it's an immediate form of communication. We're able to put on record what's happening in our times, and we want that message to be heard by the most amount of people.
Dave Sitek
#90. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
Alice McDermott
#91. I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.
Ted Chiang
#92. When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'
Nick Cave
#93. I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.
Jamaica Kincaid
#94. Many who resort to crime ultimately can't read or write.
Wally Amos
#96. You can't undo the past, but you can remedy it by creating a better future.
A.D. Posey
#97. Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.
Ayn Rand
#98. The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?
Rudy Vallee
#99. I learn a lot from acting, but it's not my natural way. I can't help but write; I do it all the time. It's a condition of being for me.
Mary Stuart Masterson
#100. Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.
Sara Paretsky
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