Top 100 Great Writing Quotes
#1. When I was very young in London, I had a bank account, which didn't have a great deal in it. I should think at least every three months the bank manager would call me up and threaten to strangle me because I had no money, and I was writing checks.
Peter Mayle
#3. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#4. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
Andre Maurois
#5. No matter how many people try, no matter how many fancy songwriters in Los Angeles try to break it down to a formula ... to an extent, there isn't a science to writing great songs, I suppose.
Lauren Mayberry
#6. Spend sunny afternoons writing. Take weekends in the country. Dream. Drink good wine, eat fabulous cheese and great bread. Make the kind of love that destroys the bed.
Rachel Hauck
#7. I like writing for other people. I love it. It's great because you write it and then you hand it off to someone else. But in terms of directing, anything I direct will be something I've written or re-written. I'm in no crazy rush to direct.
Nicholas Stoller
#8. Great writers are not those who tell us we shouldn't play with fire, but those who make our fingers burn.
Stephen Vizinczey
#9. There was a lot of great writing couples, but I try to do it all myself. And it was practically impossible, but I still managed to be ahead of my time.
Jackie DeShannon
#10. So writing is not just writing. It is also having a relationship with other writers. And don't be jealous, especially secretly. That's the worst kind. If someone writes something great, it's just more clarity in the world for all of us.
Natalie Goldberg
#11. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.
Kristen Lamb
#12. Packs a Huge Emotional Punch! Graceful Writing, Great Acting, Exquisite Direction, Suspense, Profound Subject Matter and It Rocks!
Rex Reed
#13. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.
Artie Shaw
#14. The research. It is always the best part of writing. And, of course, it is the great excuse to travel.
Michael Scott
#15. A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
#16. 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
#17. A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly. Of course you reply, "I do it to save time". A very good object, no doubt: but what right have you to do it at your friend's expense? Isn't his time as valuable as yours?
Lewis Carroll
#18. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#19. Sometimes people can write really great scenes and even a great episode, but they can't see the bigger picture.
M. Night Shyamalan
#20. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#21. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...
Kurt Vonnegut
#22. Nothing teaches great writing like the very best books do. Yet, good teachers often help students cross that bridge, and I have to say that I had a few extraordinary English teachers in high school whom I still credit for their guidance.
Julia Glass
#23. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)
Eric S. Raymond
#24. Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.
Richard LaGravenese
#25. I write titles that are confrontational. I write titles that make people want to pick up a book and find out more about it. I write good books; I write great titles though.
Larry Winget
#26. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#27. The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
#28. He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.
Stephen King
#29. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#30. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
Stephen King
#31. Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.
Dawn French
#32. I do Twitter, but I'm still not great on it - I'm not good at writing short little jokes, so my Twitter's not really a jokey thing.
Cecily Strong
#34. When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.
Pat Metheny
#35. People still make New Year's resolutions? Wow. I figured those were pointless once I perfected myself by directing, writing, and acting in Garden State. I guess it makes sense, though. It gives people a chance to hope that they can become as great as me someday.
Zach Braff
#36. I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.
Mark Nepo
#37. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.
Diane Johnson
#38. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#39. There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly.
Richard LaGravenese
#40. The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.
Barry Eisler
#41. Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.
Barack Obama
#42. How much there is I want to do! I always feel that I haven't time to accomplish what I wish. I want to read much. I wanted to write a great deal. I want to make money.
Irving Fisher
#43. Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
Baron De Montesquieu
#44. When should you show more than tell? Great writing is balanced! You do not want to be a show-all, or a tell-all. And remember we are storytellers. Balance is the key! And let your ear be the guide. Is it too heavy, or too light? Or is it just right?
Mark Donnelly
#45. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#46. My dream is to do exactly what I'm doing. I love writing and directing, and being somebody that can write about an artist I love or make a film about it. That's great. I would leave the other stuff to those who do it much better.
Cameron Crowe
#47. Primo Levi's - I mean, he's a very different kind of writer. He's a much more formal writer. He's a much more -almost detached. I mean, I wouldn't really say that he's detached ultimately. But he does write as a scientist, and so he describes things very - in great detail, very carefully.
Ann Goldstein
#48. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.
Paul Krugman
#49. The writing of headline is one of the great journalistic arts. They either conceal or reveal am interest
Claude C. Hopkins
#50. Writing a novel mimics what we bring to our journey of life. God is the great editor who purges the faulty, the awkward, and all the bits that are just plain wrong, so the optimal story can finally emerge.
Denise M. Baran-Unland
#51. For me, if the writing and - by extension - the subject matter and the characters are all good, it doesn't matter if it's film or TV. Each medium has great things going for it.
Adam Croasdell
#52. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#53. Research is so vital to a great story. Know what you're writing about!
Beem Weeks
#54. 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
#55. I'm a great believer in the experiential theory of writing.
Kate Grenville
#56. When you have that first flash of what you think is going to be a great idea-from the mouth, from the hands-that's an amazing feeling. I don't think anything's quite as good as that.
Daryl Hall
#57. People need to write articles and they need to have angles in them and I'm grateful when people are doing articles, but I always say there's not a great mystery to stand-up comedy.
Jim Gaffigan
#58. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
#59. A barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name ... One of our tribe of great men who turn disease to commodity ... he craves the sympathy for sickness as a portion of his glory.
John Quincy Adams
#60. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.
Henry David Thoreau
#61. Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
Edmund White
#62. It's not how great the ideas are. It's about how you write them, to make them great.
Primadonna Angela
#63. Write until your fingers bleed. Imagine until you have considered all the possibilities. Only then will it be considered a great work.
J.C. Brennan
#64. I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.
Ravi Shankar
#65. It's great for my daughter to see Beyonce and Taylor Swift, women that are in charge of their own careers, writing songs from their own perspective and taking people to task. That's very different from when I was growing up - it was all like, 'Stand by your man.'
Corin Tucker
#66. Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
C.S. Lewis
#67. David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
#68. My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.
Jo Nesbo
#69. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#70. 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
#71. I am not fully forgiven until I allow God to write his new dream for my life on the blackboard of my mind.. God has a great plan to redeem society. He needs me and wants to use me.
Robert H. Schuller
#72. You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties.
Rick Aster
#73. Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.
Agatha Christie
#74. I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
Jonathan Lethem
#75. Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that.
Pearl Cleage
#76. 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
#77. The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.
Claudia Bakker
#78. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.
Anis Shivani
#79. The essential key for writing is to write regularly - like it or not - great ideas come often by writing; releasing the subconscious - waiting for inspiration and ideas will not work, but it does help to have a notebook with you all the time for sudden brainstorms or inspiration.
Robert Marc Friedman
#80. We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.
James Mangold
#81. 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
#82. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#83. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition-to write something worthwhile.
Jim Morrison
#85. Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.
T.K. Naliaka
#86. If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.
Dave Barry
#87. Of course you want to be good and you want to do the best you can, but I am inspired by great writing. If there's something about the script, that's what I go for, although I know that that doesn't always translate because sometimes it's about the vision of the director.
Sally Hawkins
#88. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
Jean Rhys
#89. I used to be opposed to collaboration, and that's probably why the music in the past wasn't as good. Writing with other people, especially the great writers that I've had the privilege to write with, it activates something in your mind that you wouldn't use alone.
Charlie Puth
#90. She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.
Brandon Villasenor
#92. There is a mystery in all great writing and that mystery does not dissect out. It continues and is always valid.
Ernest Hemingway,
#93. I have a great job writing for 'The Office,' but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I'll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.
Mindy Kaling
#94. The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#95. Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.
Sarah Colliver
#96. Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work.
Glen Hirshberg
#97. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.
Neil Leckman
#98. Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.
Steve Earle
#99. It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.
Jon Turteltaub
#100. When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
Ray Bradbury
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