How Do I Write Quotes

#1. The thing that's interesting about storytelling is people will say, "How do I write a movie I can get sold in this category?" For God's sake, the first movie that you can get made will be your personal story, because nobody's heard it before.

Joan Tewkesbury

#2. How do I write the stories I do? Honestly I just make sh** up!"
-Erin Rambeau

Erin Rambeau

#3. 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.

#4. I couldn't not write. Sometimes I ask myself, How do people get through life without writing? I write to calm anxiety, to process pain. Writing to me is reflection.

Andrew Holleran

#5. 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

#6. Every year I tell myself that I'm not going to read any reviews and then I do. We're all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it's part of the game, you're going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that's how it goes. I don't write for the reviews.

Jodi Picoult

#7. I never really write the jokes. I just sit down over a week or two and try to figure out what I want to talk about. Once I narrow that down, then I start working on the material, like "How do I make this stuff funny?"

Chris Rock

#8. I think it's important to let each thing you write teach you how to write it. You must listen to what you do. Let it be in control. I don't step in until I know what it demands of me.

Jill Alexander Essbaum

#9. 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

#10. I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'

Dick Van Dyke

#11. 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

#12. Ask yourself, "Why do I want to be in shape?" and write all ... Put your list everywhere to constantly remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing and how your life will improve by becoming fitter.

Jillian Michaels

#13. 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

#14. 'Victorious' for me was a chance to write a song exactly how I was feeling - I was feeling triumphant, I was feeling like I could do anything as long as I've got the people that I love by my side. We're gonna go out and conquer it, and party, and just be awesome.

Brendon Urie

#15. I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

David Antin

#16. I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer.

Alyson Richman

#17. I do not know how old I was when the daydreams became more than that, and I decided to write them down, but by the time I entered high school, I was confident that I would one day be a writer.

Mildred D. Taylor

#18. I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

John Darnielle

#19. Everytime I write, it's a catharsis. Even if I never got paid for it, I'd feel compelled to do it. And that's what makes a true writer. It's not how many readers you have or how many publishing contracts. Do you love to write? Then you're an author. No one can take that away from you.

Piper Vaughn

#20. One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

Justin Cronin

#21. When I was growing up, my parents asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to live in Springfield. They were like, "Well, that's not how it works. There is an actor who play Homer, and someone who writes what Homer says." So, I was like, "Well, I want to write what Homer says."

Jonah Hill

#22. How many words a day do I write? Between six and seven thousand. And how many hours does that take? Three on a good day, as high as thirteen on a bad one

John Creasey

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.

Charles De Lint

#26. When we put the pen to paper, we articulate things in our life that we may have felt vague about. Before you write about something, somebody says, 'How do you feel?' and you say, 'Oh, I feel okay.' Then you write about it, and you discover you don't feel okay.

Julia Cameron

#27. Everyone has a book within them. Everyone has to write it thinking, 'How will I help other people? What will the book do to touch lives?'

Joachim De Posada

#28. I come up with the ideas for my videos, and I write the lyrics and choreograph them, and I direct them and tell everyone what to do and how I want them to sing the parts and do the tongue pops and eye rolls and stuff like that.

Todrick Hall

#29. There were many years when I was hand-to-mouth and didn't know how I was gonna make rent. I've done every job under the sun, from busing tables, temping, and working in factories to SAT prep and detailing cars. So to be able to make a living where all I do is write is absolutely liberating.

Beau Willimon

#30. People ask me all the time why I write. I do realize that one day I will have to answer this question, most likely in front of a large crowd. But how do you tell the truth when you struggle just to write it? How do you admit that the words are just salve to the things you are too afraid to say?

Kacey Vanderkarr

#31. I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

Hannah Arendt

#32. Ever since I could first write I have been doing so. When I was taught how to write and read at school, I made up my mind that this was what I love to do best and this was the world I was going to occupy.

Anita Desai

#33. People say, "How do you write songs?" I say, "Patience." I may have a track that's hot, but no words. I'll just let it sit for years, because I know they're going to meet. They'll find it.

Ben Harper

#34. Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.

William Zinsser

#35. Your clothing is not - how do we say? - not in harmony with the evening. Your shoes - oh, your shoes! I could write several depressing poems in the styling of Monsieur Camus about the existential problems posed by your shoes.

Christopher Bunn

#36. Its funny when I'm cyber bullied(anonymously) because when people do it to me,I don't think of how much I want to hurt them or punch them in the face like my friends do ... but I go on this site and write a quote to them back, hoping to kill them with kindness.

Ashley Jackson

#37. I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.

Sue Grafton

#38. I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.

Louis C.K.

#39. I never believed I could write anything. No way - write a whole story? Figuring out all that plotting and symbolism? How do you foreshadow things?

Carol Berg

#40. We all rely on technology to communicate, to survive, to do our banking, to shop, to get informed, but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

Will.i.am

#41. The only real rule I know in writing is, Don't be boring. Sleeping people don't read a word you write or hear a thing you say. How can they? They are asleep. So don't put anyone to sleep, and you will probably do okay.

Max D. Adams

#42. It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#43. I'd like to write a big rock anthem again.
I just need to listen to Korn, and then
I might get the idea of how to do it.

Robert Plant

#44. I write what I want and how I want. Reviews do not need to be condescending nor do they need to tell me to read your book (if you're a fellow author). Either you like the books or you don't. That's all there is to it.

Amanda Byrd

#45. It's not like what I do, how I write, changes depending on the nature of the project. I give each story my all, regardless of if there are a few thousand people reading it or a few hundred thousand.

Jason Aaron

#46. I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

Simon Armitage

#47. You have to insulate yourself - I'm talking about from everything, people can be talking to you and you won't hear 'em - that's how you write a song. And I haven't been able to do that over here 'cause I'm so busy and then, when I am off, I want to get away from music.

Mel Tillis

#48. How it works for me is that a scene comes to mind, usually a scene between the hero and heroine, that depicts the emotional conflict. From that scene, the characters come alive for me. I don't do a lot of preplanning in any way when I write.

Lori Foster

#49. Honestly, I feel pretty awed anytime I meet just about any writer. I get how hard it is to write and make a living from it, but there's also this almost magical force you need to tap into, and I'm amazed by anyone who can do it.

Jennifer McMahon

#50. I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

Chelsea Cain

#51. Ignorance breeds antipathy. Until I got to know how computers worked, I didn't want anything to do with them. I said, 'Well, why do I need them? I write letters.' Which I still do.

Viggo Mortensen

#52. I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile.

Melissa Rosenberg

#53. I dream my poems
and write my dreams.
We can only write our own dreams,
not the dreams of others,
for our dreams speak from our hearts.
For those who do not dream poems,
how can they know what dreams
their hearts want to write?

Jeffrey A. White

#54. I once did hold it, as our statists do,
A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much
How to forget that learning; but, sir, now
It did me yeoman's service.

William Shakespeare

#55. I don't want to write lines where characters tell me exactly how they feel; I want to see people talk about anything but their feelings, like they do in real life.

Tobias Lindholm

#56. I do not want to write beyond this point, because those days when I studied relentlessly are nostalgic to me; and on the other hand, I am sad when I think how I have become increasingly preoccupied with matters other than study.

Hideki Yukawa

#57. Writing every day is very, very helpful, but set the bar at a place where you have no excuse: It doesn't matter how tired you are, how late it is, you will do it. So if you say, "I will write one hundred words a day" - set the bar there, and then you can actually get over that bar.

N.D. Wilson

#58. They say shock therapy is good for some things, but it didn't do me any good. It was a pretty primitive treatment at the time - once they gave it to you, you couldn't remember how long you'd been there. It knocked me back for a long time. I thought I'd never write again.

Don Everly

#59. I have to really think hard about how to structure sentences, and do more mapping when I sit down to write, so it does impose a certain discipline, intellectual and linguistic.

Daniel Alarcon

#60. You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be obsequious to me or do I want to write good books? If it's the latter, you have to take criticism. It's annoying, but that's how to do good stuff; listen to other people.

Denise Mina

#61. I love my work but do not know how I write it.

Zane Grey

#62. I go to school here, same as you,' Han said.
Micah blinked at him stupidly, the drink slowing him down. 'You? Do you even know how to read and write? They can't have lowered the standards that much.'
'Well,' Han said, 'they let you in.

Cinda Williams Chima

#63. Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.

Kate Atkinson

#64. I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.

Amy Bloom

#65. Daniel, I was asked of a budding author, how do you know if your story is on track? My answer: I start by knowing my intention, my target. Then, with purpose, I write the scene that unfolds before me, as faithfully as is human. - Daniel LaMonte

Daniel LaMonte

#66. During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.

Bootsy Collins

#67. You can write a song about a girl or you can write a song about walking down the shops, and it's fine. I just try and do something as meaningful as I can without trying to be a pretentious loser because it's genuinely just how I see things.

Matt Corby

#68. I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.

Linus Torvalds

#69. In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."

Thomas L. Dumm

#70. Happy endings are all I can do. I wouldn't know how to write anything else.

Julia Quinn

#71. But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?
Yes ... the same age you will be if you don't.

Julia Cameron

#72. I write to explore something that fascinates me, and I write the way I do because it is the only way I know how to write.

Cathy Marie Buchanan

#73. I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

Jodi Picoult

#74. I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

Lorrie Moore

#75. You do try to write songs that you feel like people can relate to and you try to be as honest as you can so that people hear your records and they feel like, "Oh, my god. This is exactly how I feel. I went through this."

Sevyn Streeter

#76. I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

Dana Spiotta

#77. How do I let the director know how obsessed I am and willing to do anything for the movie? Like, I wanted to write this one director a letter, so I wrote him a handwritten note. But then I was like, 'How many people are writing this guy handwritten letters? Is it going to seem cheesy? What do I do?'

Jennifer Lawrence

#78. People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.

R.L. Stine

#79. My dear Tom,
Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

Samuel Beckett

#80. I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

Hisham Matar

#81. That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

Benjamin Clementine

#82. I think that what I do, in terms of how I craft my words rhetorically, is fairly simple stuff. I don't mean that to denigrate myself. I mean that in the sense of, when I write, the person that I keep in mind is my mother-in-law.

John Scalzi

#83. I wanted to be of service to the Peace League, and how could I better do so than by trying to write a book which should propagate its ideas? And I could do it most effectively, I thought, in the form of a story.

Bertha Von Suttner

#84. If you look at the body of any writers' work, you can figure out the questions that animate them. I think that is what real writers do. They don't tell people how to live or what to think. They write in order to try to answer their own deepest questions.

Isobelle Carmody

#85. I was in Siena and decided I wanted to write a story set there. Then I discovered that the original story of Romeo and Juliet was set in Siena. It occurred to me that this was too much of a gift - I had to do it. That's how I ended up writing a parallel story to Romeo and Juliet.

Anne Fortier

#86. I refuse to write the same story twice. I keep experimenting. I keep learning how to work. I've been at it pretty much 50 years, and I'm now beginning to learn how to do the job well.

Harlan Ellison

#87. I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

Gary Hume

#88. Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.

Jerry Spinelli

#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. Some people don't have a way of that catharsis and I do, so I'm lucky in that sense that people listen to my songs and enjoy my songs. It's a really important thing for me, it's how I channel everything. I don't really know what I'd do if I didn't write songs.

Ellie Goulding

#91. I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives.

Rene Balcer

#92. I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?

Siobhan Fahey

#93. I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.

James Frey

#94. The thing I know how to do most is write a play. I came up loving plays and learning about plays and writing plays. I actually feel like an outsider when I'm writing movies and television.

Aaron Sorkin

#95. Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.

Ornette Coleman

#96. My school was 17 years as a player and another 16 watching more games probably than any coach has - all over the world, all systems. I couldn't go to school and write it down for people who are far less experienced, telling me what to do and how to do it.

Andy Gray

#97. When we're falling in love or out of it, that's when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I'm very happy to do that.

Taylor Swift

#98. Feeling is always first for me in anything. I think the only way for sure that I know how do that is to write songs about things I feel strongly about.

Brother Ali

#99. 'How long do you want me to stay in there so you can talk about me behind my back?' Zak called.
'A couple of hours. I could write a book about you,' Logan shot back.
'Make sure you make it clear my dick's bigger than yours.'

Barbara Elsborg

#100. For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Adam Gopnik