Can Write Quotes

#1. You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think
I did
that God put you on earth to blow your father away.

Stephen King

#2. If I worked as a waiter, I'd go home and write songs and record them. I'd have to. It's the only thing I know how to do. It's the only thing I can do.

Albert Hammond Jr.

#3. But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.

Augusten Burroughs

#4. You can write and visualize goals all you want, but if you do not take action, your goals will never become a reality. To obtain a goal you have never before achieved will require tasks you have never before done.

Cameron C. Taylor

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.

Marilyn Hacker

#8. One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.

Evelyn Waugh

#9. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Artie Shaw

#10. No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Philip Levine

#11. I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

Iain Banks

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

George Orwell

#15. The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

Chris Stapleton

#16. 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

#17. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

Octavia Butler

#18. 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,

#19. You can try to reach an audience, but you just write what comes out of you and you just hope that it is accepted. You do not write specifically to a generation.

Leon Uris

#20. 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

#21. I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

Wislawa Szymborska

#22. Write your own music and write frequently. Go to as many live shows as you can as well (of bands you enjoy of course). You can learn a lot watching other performers.

Dia Frampton

#23. We can't know everything," I said quietly. "Sometimes we have to write our own future.

Denise Grover Swank

#24. I write because I know that one day I will die, and thus I should experience as many deliberate observations, careful thoughts, wild ideas, and deep emotions as I can before that day occurs.

Amy Tan

#25. I just write whenever I can.

Elmer Kelton

#26. It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

Colin Wilson

#27. 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

#28. I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.

Miguel

#29. 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

#30. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

Paul Rudnick

#31. The smartest people can write the worst emails and those of less intellect can write the best.

Paul Babicki

#32. It's amazing what you can do when you get creative.

A.D. Posey

#33. 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

#34. If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

Kurt Vonnegut

#35. However, if you're already inclined to both write and pray, you may as well figure out how they can help each other.

Ed Cyzewski

#36. The difference between people who can read and write and those who can't is just absolutely astronomical.

Juan Enriquez

#37. 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

#38. I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Barbara Kingsolver

#39. True storytellers write not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story.

John Freeman

#40. 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

#41. You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

James Baldwin

#42. Here in New York City you can now walk around smoking weed and all they will do if they see you is write you a ticket. Unfortunately, the ticket will be to a Jets game.

David Letterman

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

Moon Unit Zappa

#48. Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

Patrick Ness

#49. People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

Toni Cade Bambara

#50. The neatest thing about television is that they write for you ... They find out what you can do, what you do best, how it works, and how they can use you.

Ann B. Davis

#51. This quality becomes important at a time when almost everyone is a poet. And as I said, we live in an age where almost everybody is a poet, but scarcely anyone can write a poem.

Clive James

#52. Well I mean I just sit at the piano and maybe figure out some harmony or melody or both. Sometimes you can hear it in your head. Sometimes you don't always have to write it down. You just write it down so you can remember it.

Roy Hargrove

#53. You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

Jami Attenberg

#54. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

Chevy Stevens

#55. I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak.

Julia Cameron

#56. Augusta created a magical object called the Interpreter Stone, and I came up with a simpler magical language to go along with it. So now, instead of reciting a difficult verbal spell, a sorcerer can use the simpler language to write his spell on cards and feed it to the stone.

Dima Zales

#57. My website inspired me to create my book club and provides me with a creative outlet where I can write about things that interest me. It's a platform where I can present ideas or new ventures and get feedback straight from the people who mean the most to me.

Lauren Conrad

#58. Sometimes you can write a great scene, but when you're actually in a situation and it doesn't work, you have to be flexible enough to make it work for you.

Diane Kruger

#59. I'd love to have another film to go on to. I'm in the mood to work. But I have to be patient, you know, to find that particular kind of project. Occasionally I'll write one myself if I can summon up the energy.

Peter Weir

#60. Can you repeat that pickup line for me?"
I heard one of the vamps ask.
"I want to write it down. Something about the usual?

Karen Chance

#61. No good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one ...

John Geddes

#62. It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Bevore you can write anything, you have to notice something.

John Irving

#63. Seven-11 is the pulse-beat of America. I think that Bruce Springsteen should do a song about a 7-11 in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but write it in such a way that American's youth can identify and slurp along with the Boss. Hail the Boss! Hail 7-11!

Henry Rollins

#64. I have never pretended to be a great writer. I am totally immodest about being a great reporter and a good news writer. I write fast and I write accurately, nearly as accurately as anybody can be, and that's my skill.

Walter Cronkite

#65. If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

Vikram Seth

#66. I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it.

Norton Juster

#67. Ah men, why do you want all this attention? I can write poems for myself, make love to a doorknob if absolutely necessary. What do you have to offer me I can't find otherwise except humiliation? Which I no longer need.

Margaret Atwood

#68. I can't rightly say where deciding to write about the American Revolution came from; I had bits and pieces of information about the war and about the country at that time that I'd collected over the years and, of course, I'm comfortable in the woods, so, finally, it just all feel into place.

Gary Paulsen

#69. The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

Nikki Giovanni

#70. I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

Anthony Hopkins

#71. I wanted people who wouldn't become too worried about casualties. One always should be concerned about casualties, but the risk of incurring casualties can't be allowed to affect decisions, unless it's evident casualties will be prohibitively heavy. There may be no safe way to write this.

Christopher Vokes

#72. I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

Robert Morgan

#73. After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

Vikram Seth

#74. I want to write a score for a film. It can be a proper film, maybe for a film kind of like ... I saw that movie 'Drive', or a bit of a 'Blade Runner' vibe. A little bit sci-fi, but I don't know. I've just always wanted to write a score for a film.

Flume

#75. I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#76. The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: 'T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.' To which the proper response is: 'But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can't.

Ken Wilber

#77. I don't think age has much to do with writing. I think it's something that can certainly improve in time, but there's no age limit on how old you need to be to write well.

Sandy Hall

#78. A Tibetan Lama said to me, "The best place to stand, Ram Dass, is halfway between hope and hopelessness." So I can write a scenario for the 21st century in either direction. One is that it all goes to hell and that it's truly the dark age.

Ram Dass

#79. Here's a lesson for you, Sonny: Don't write if you can talk, don' talk if you can nod your head, don't nod if you don't have to

Ed Falco

#80. I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.

Anthony Mackie

#81. Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me ... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive, fun entertainment.

Janet Evanovich

#82. I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.

Newt Gingrich

#83. I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

Alan Rickman

#84. You can get sucked into the idea that, 'Gosh, this is impressive. Maybe I should do this. It will look good.' Or 'I'll write like this because it will impress that critic.'

Amy Tan

#85. I think one artist to another artist, the best compliment you can pay one another, because the part of you that is inspired or creates something, to write a joke or a song, that's like the God-like part of a person.

Dave Chappelle

#86. Producers on Broadway approached us with an original script after relaunching ourselves as 'A Great Big World,' and wanted us to write the music. They asked us to make the music we would sing if we could, and so we can go a little crazier. We refer to it as 'our music on steroids.'

Ian Axel

#87. Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can't possibly write a line you do it anyhow.

Henry Denker

#88. Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

Jon Scieszka

#89. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#90. Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.

John Darnielle

#91. The more life experience you have, the more comedy you can write.

Judy Gold

#92. I don't have writer's block, really. I do have times when I can't get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don't write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone - the whole point of view.

Nora Ephron

#93. You can write shorthand and still look at the guy you're talking to.

Michael Caine

#94. There are writers' rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone's process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.

Jim Rash

#95. Truth is something that happens whether or not we see it, or believe it, or write about. Truth just is. We can call it something else, or pretend it didn't happen, but its repercussions live with us, whether we choose to remember and acknowledge it or not.

Anonymous

#96. My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

Roger Zelazny

#97. A good fiction writer can write any character or any story that she wants to write. The importance, IMO, is a burning desire to tell that person's story.

Suzanne Brockmann

#98. You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'

Damian Lewis

#99. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

#100. I can write absolutely anywhere. All I need is a laptop.

Joanne Harris