Early Writing Quotes

#1. In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

James Dashner

#2. Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

Philip Hensher

#3. I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

Helen Dunmore

#4. One of the most productive times in my early writing life was while I had a full-time job as a word processor in a law firm and also worked part-time at night, often working until 11:00 P.M.

John Lescroart

#5. As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: "Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B."

Devendra Banhart

#6. My early writing was a silent fury - at what or whom, I had no idea - but I shut it in until it burned my bones and now, I've let it out ...

John Geddes

#7. But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

Seth Grahame-Smith

#8. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

#9. Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

Julia Cameron

#10. Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.

Fareed Zakaria

#11. For writing, I get up early in the morning - 5 o'clock, 4:30. I'm a morning person ... So I try to do it while people are asleep. The mornings are the nicest.

Patti Scialfa

#12. Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.

Andy Biersack

#13. 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

#14. Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.

Elie Wiesel

#15. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

Anne Enright

#16. 'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.

Jerry Leiber

#17. From very early on, I've realized that and I have a mission statement with my songs to entertain, to encourage and to challenge the Body of Christ. That's always kind of the focus of the songs that I write for myself.

Jonny Diaz

#18. I usually work seven days a week and rarely take vacations, which is both lame and unsustainable. I don't mind the idea of writing seven days a week, I suppose. Getting some work done early in the morning. But ideally I would love to take one day a week off.

Brad Listi

#19. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

#20. I dunno, when I started writing really I was like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex ... occasionally, stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls ...

Tom Waits

#21. When I was 4 years old my mother put me into an early music education school. That's where they taught you perfect pitch and harmony and how to write music and all that. At that time, one of the homeworks was to listen to all the sounds and the noise of a day and transfer that into musical notes.

Yoko Ono

#22. I write much better in the nonconfines of the early morning than I do the clutter of the day.

Rod Serling

#23. I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any.

Dick Cheney

#24. With directing, you have to wake up early, which stinks, but you get to hang out with the crew, you're laughing, you're active, and you're working with the actors. It's just more fun than writing. Writing is very hard.

Amy Sherman-Palladino

#25. I think we're always in some ways writing to the teachers who gave us early love.

Dan Chaon

#26. Often I had to imagine the things I needed. I learned very early to read amidst noise. And so I started writing and drawing at an early age.

Gunter Grass

#27. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

Wole Soyinka

#28. I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

Sue Townsend

#29. When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.

Ruth Ozeki

#30. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Toni Morrison

#31. Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film.

William Gibson

#32. Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

Thomas Bernhard

#33. I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.

Garth Nix

#34. I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.

George Ogilvie

#35. Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.

Robert Adamson

#36. Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Margaret Atwood

#37. Actually, time and time again people always come back to my early, more innocent stuff, and say, "I kind of prefer that." I could go back to writing that and probably make more people happy, but it just doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I don't want to take the lazy route.

Herbert

#38. My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.

Chris Crutcher

#39. When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years.

Lou Gramm

#40. I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

Dan Chaon

#41. I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

Aaron Sorkin

#42. As long as I can remember, I've been writing - first poems, then stories, and by my early teenage years I was also in love with sailing.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#43. I continued writing the bad plays which fortunately nobody would produce, just as no one did me the unkindness of publishing my early novels.

Patrick White

#44. I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.

Gavin Hood

#45. I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

Steve Capus

#46. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

William, Saroyan

#47. I can remember in my early days of writing going to sort of writers' functions and parties and things like that, and I used to get very irritated because when people heard that you came from the suburbs, they had this notion that it was very un-cool to come from there.

Ronald Frame

#48. I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

Harry Turtledove

#49. I realised that the only time I really enjoyed music was when I was in the studio writing. So even though it was a six album deal, they saw quite early on that I wasn't enjoying it as I should be. I didn't feel there was anything behind it.

Adam Rickitt

#50. When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music.

John Trudell

#51. I always keep myself busy. I'm writing. Or I'm creating something. Or I'm doing stuff with the kids. I'm up incredibly early in the morning; I go to bed incredibly late at night.

Natascha McElhone

#52. Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant.

Walter Gilbert

#53. In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since.

Gary Numan

#54. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

Patrick White

#55. I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don't see someone who looks like their mother.

Julia Quinn

#56. A lot of the people I was writing with think a lot more about lyrics and a lot more about the details from the beginning. That kind of thinking made me a little self-conscious because I was suddenly having to judge what I was doing early on in the process.

St. Lucia

#57. I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Michael Redhill

#58. Early retirement, Dalton. Teach yourself to type with your toes and you
can start writing your memoirs.

Mark Allen Smith

#59. I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.

Tim Cahill

#60. If you want to write what the world is about, you have to write details ... real life is in the dishes. Real life is pushing strollers up the street, folding T-shirts, the alarm clock going off early and you dropping into bed exhausted every night. That's real life.

Anna Quindlen

#61. Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.

Warren Adler

#62. I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

Graeme Simsion

#63. In the early stages of writing children's books, an experienced lady editor said that while girls read boys' books, the converse was not true, and I may have been influenced by that.

John Christopher

#64. I was teaching myself notes from three and then by seven I'd figured out how to play some chords, and at school I used to love writing poems and poetry, so I guess I kind of put two and two together and that formed my songwriting from an early age.

Ella Henderson

#65. Virginia Woolf came along in the early part of the century and essentially said through her writing, yes, big books can be written about the traditional big subjects. There is war. There is the search for God. These are all very important things.

Michael Cunningham

#66. Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while.

David Eddings

#67. Will Arnett and I were never in the same room, but once I saw early animation we started writing music for that and then he just kind of did his little rap over top, some of it was free form and some of it I made up, we all just kind of contributed to it.

Mark Mothersbaugh

#68. When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people.

Wayne Kramer

#69. Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler's vocabulary.

John Early

#70. For the entire decade of my 30s and the early part of my 40s, I didn't write a word of fiction. I just left behind a dream of my life.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#71. In the early days, it was, you know, I used to weep while I was writing. I used to grab at any kind of anything, any hint, any tip of how to make it easy.

Sue Townsend

#72. Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. J.Paul Getty

Alison Wong

#73. I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there's a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don't think it's my finest work.

Willie Nelson

#74. When a book is in its final stages, I've just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that's fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I'd just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That's sort of ideal.

Pam Houston

#75. I always loved strange stories like the Dr. Seuss stuff. 'Go, Dog. Go!' was one of my favorite stories - it still is. It's just such a bizarre yet true book. And I did well reading and writing as a kid throughout school. I think early on that's what made me realize what an advantage that is.

Jon Scieszka

#76. I wasn't a class clown, I just found at an early age that I was able to make people laugh. So I mostly wrote funny stuff instead of writing what I was supposed to be writing.

Alan Zweibel

#77. I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

Sara Sheridan

#78. I would describe my style of songwriting as classic. I learned very early on and have stuck to the core principles of song structure regardless of which genre I'm writing in.

Wendy Starland

#79. It's an unmeetable level of writing. But even if it's something I feel like I can't ever attain, it doesn't crush my spirit. I figured out early on that you gotta find your own strengths and hone them rather than trying to emulate something that impresses you.

Paul Banks

#80. I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.

Carl Sandburg

#81. You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early ... Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!

Israelmore Ayivor

#82. My early life has given me a great deal to draw on, certainly - but would I have swapped a happy childhood for the writing? Yes.

Bruce Robinson

#83. Whatever else may be thought of the evidence from early Jewish and Gentile writers it does at least establish, for those who refuse the witness of Christian writings, the historical character of Jesus Himself.

F.F. Bruce

#84. I'm really boring. I get up early. I go to bed early. I don't smoke or drink. I mean, I'll eat a cupcake. I'm just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.

Karin Slaughter

#85. The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.

Philip Glass

#86. My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#87. Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?
Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Ernest Hemingway,

#88. Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I'd force myself to sit down until I came up with something.

Luke Bryan

#89. These motivational tapes have really inspired me! I'm going to make a million dollars, buy my own company and retire early. Then, I'm going to write a novel and a symphony and give all the profits to charity. Then next month, I'll figure out how to do it.

Randy Glasbergen

#90. I had a lot of really terrible advice early in my writing career and I cheesed off people without even knowing it, all the while thinking I was implementing good advice.

Douglas Coupland

#91. You really don't understand the first thing about writing ... for one thing, early in the morning is the worst possible time. the brain is like a wet sponge at that hour. And for another, real writing is a question of staring into space and waiting for the right ideas.

Cornelia Funke

#92. surfing, writing, composing, and programming deep into the night, like it's the early 1980s with the hue of poison-green CRT illuminating the room, Nike running shoes on the floor, hair metal poster on the door, and everything is infinite, made of fibre optics and floppy disks . . .

Mike Walker

#93. When I'm writing a score, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve on it, even when I think it's working well. I don't give up on things, and am always trying to make incremental improvements, which means I never finish writing a score early!

Geoff Zanelli

#94. I had been encouraged a lot by my parents and my sixth grade teacher, James Doyle at Main Street Elementary School. He was an early supporter of my writing ability.

Mike Scully

#95. But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

Russell Banks

#96. I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

Dana Spiotta

#97. The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

Jess Walter

#98. [The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.

Dan Beachy-Quick

#99. Like all teenagers in the early '60s, I put down my hockey stick when the Beatles got big and picked up a guitar. We all thought we'd be rock stars. Then I got into comedy, but I'd always find a way to use my guitar, such as writing songs and doing musical parodies.

Rick Moranis

#100. When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

Jonathan Meades