Top 100 How To Write Quotes
#1. Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.
Elmore Leonard
#2. But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad.
Thomas Bernhard
#3. There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
Ernest Hemingway,
#4. The reason I'm here today, the reason I own a brand new Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the reason I have a big log cabin and I got cars and all kinds of stuff is because I'm a writer and writers own everything. So you learn how to write.
Dan Aykroyd
#5. Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.
Marcus Sakey
#6. I don't tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.
Ray Bradbury
#7. It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway,
#8. You don't teach a person how to write as much as you teach that person how to survive the writing process.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
#9. You see, I'm not the hack. God is. And the Old Fart doesn't know how to write a conclusion that'll satisfy his audience. He leaves that to us, his lost children, doing his dirty work, inventing uplifting endings to erase his mistakes.
Rafael Yglesias
#10. I'm crazy about 'Breaking Bad,' but I wouldn't know how to write an episode of it.
Aaron Sorkin
#11. When my syndicated show got canceled, the next day I still knew how to write jokes. That was a huge revelation. Because at first you think, "I won't have any shelter! What am I gonna do? The sun is hot. Very thirsty."
Jon Stewart
#12. I didn't know how to write a novel, so I sort of let it happen in waves. The only way I could write it was to think like scenes in a movie.
Eileen Myles
#13. I am profoundly uncertain how to write. I know what I love and what I like, because it's a direct passionate response. But when I write, I'm very uncertain whether it's good enough. That is, of course, the writer's agony.
Susan Sontag
#14. I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.
Hannah Kent
#16. Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.
Eugene O'Neill
#17. Nobody was ever hiring me just because I knew how to write code, they're hiring us to solve a problem that exists in their business. The coding was the medium to get to that goal, when I focused on the goal rather than the skill it made it easier to justify my services as an investment.
Liam Veitch
#18. I didn't really know how to write jokes, so I just told weird, long stories about being tall and beautiful and wealthy in New York. I'd tell them very seriously, but I kind of looked like a drag queen at the time with big wigs and crazy 12-inch platform heels.
Melissa McCarthy
#19. Where are the reporters of yesteryear?' he muttered, 'the nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?
Annie Proulx
#20. I think that songwriting is understood from an early age that was the priority to figure out first. Learn to write a good song, and then figure out who you are as an artist because, once you know how to write a good song, you can dress it in any kind of clothing.
Lights
#21. I don't therefore know how to write for the big papers. It must be kids - students - and retired people. And the reality is they are overwhelmed with people sending in their holiday stories and bits and pieces and so on.
John Gimlette
#22. My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.
Vik Muniz
#23. You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.
Sue Grafton
#24. If I have learned how to write fiction it's by working with great writers and getting them to explain their craft to me so that I can do it in English.
Elliott Colla
#25. If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life.
Taylor Swift
#26. You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.
Wallace Stegner
#27. Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.
Grace Paley
#28. The fact is, when I wrote 'Juno' - and I think this is part of its charm and appeal - I didn't know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made!
Diablo Cody
#29. As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!
Jacqueline Susann
#30. It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write.
Neil MacGregor
#31. I've always been sort of entrepreneurial ... I felt that I needed to learn how to write and produce so I could write my own thing and not worry about Hollywood finding me.
Larry Wilmore
#32. But it is not at all unthinkable for anyone to tell a writer how to write. It comes with the territory.
Ernest Lehman
#33. This is the city that taught me how to write all of these cool songs. Yeah, you guys definitely need a royalty.
Katy Perry
#34. I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.
Shane Carruth
#35. At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler.
Dennis Ritchie
#36. It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.
Annie Dillard
#37. A writer is a person who writes.
Actually, it was John Braine's quote in his book HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL. But I use it all the time
Andrew Puckett
#38. The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
Gabriel Fielding
#39. Sometimes, I don't know that words for things,
how to write down the feeling of knowing
that every dying person leaves something behind.
Jacqueline Woodson
#40. Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn't mean you know how to write.
Greg Rucka
#41. I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [ ... ] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.
Rasmus Lerdorf
#42. You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.
Callimachus
#43. If I knew how to write a poem, I wouldn't.
James Galvin
#45. Iranian high school students learned how to draw microscopes and how to write letter-perfect descriptions of the way in which microscopes worked, but the microscopes in Iranian schools usually remained locked up as property too valuable to be put in students' hands. The
Roy Mottahedeh
#46. The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.
Joseph Addison
#47. Different instructors' approaches may 'clash' with each other and result in confusion and unclear direction for the students. It's like attempting to learn how to write using both hands at the same time. How far would you go?
Igor Babailov
#48. My best advice for aspiring writers is to read a lot and write. Don't worry if you don't get your first, fifth or tenth novel published, if you keep going you'll make it. Also read "how to write" books as they may make the process a bit quicker.
Katie Fforde
#49. I wouldn't know how to write a weak female character. I read so much epic fantasy growing up, where you have these sword-wielding, in-your-face warrior maidens.
Richelle Mead
#50. I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That's something I've had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don't know how to write it.
Lynn Coady
#51. Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Eudora Welty
#52. I am uneasy about the practice of other people telling you how to write. This is especially true for beginners who haven't yet developed their style and their writer's persona and are easily pushed off the course.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#53. I'd like to teach kids how to write songs. This will be my first year so I'm just as green as some of the rest of the folks. It's like a music camp and I get to hang out with some of the past contestants.
Bo Bice
#54. Here I am, a Palestinian Arab who only knows how to write in Hebrew, stuck in central Illinois,
Sayed Kashua
#55. I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn't bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I'd bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with.
Diablo Cody
#56. The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
James Rollins
#57. People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.
Charles Bukowski
#58. They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.
Rana Dasgupta
#59. you see, the thing is, I just don't know
how to write anything that doesn't
start with a lump in my throat.
And I really don't know how to write anything
that doesn't end with your hands on my neck.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#60. No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.
Alice Hoffman
#61. Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
Nile Rodgers
#62. By the time you get a job, you know how to behave in a meeting or how to write a simple memo.
Howard Rheingold
#63. I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.
Kate Atkinson
#64. I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career.
Drew Carey
#65. Without a doubt, if I had it to do all over again, I would do whatever it takes to be a one-person studio. You need to learn how to write so you can control the material. If you own the material, you can do it all.
James Woods
#66. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.
John D'Agata
#67. The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.
Steven Pinker
#68. Give someone a book, they'll read for a day. Teach someone how to write a book, they'll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self doubt.
Lauren DeStefano
#69. I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.
Sarah MacLean
#70. I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.
John Irving
#71. I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.
Mark Zuckerberg
#72. There are no real guidelines or maps in Australia as to how to write a show, whereas in Hollywood it's where the TV industry is created and there's a lot of work that goes into development.
Jason Gann
#73. Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.
Mary Karr
#74. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.
Alan Furst
#75. I'm writing from a place of - a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.
K'naan
#76. all know we do not need talent to learn how to write as a communication
Mark Kistler
#77. We must learn, and we are gradually learning, how to write history with the help of archaeology.
Michael Rostovtzeff
#78. Scott Adams: From him, I learned how to write a three-panel comic. Probably the best pure writer on the comics page.
Stephan Pastis
#79. After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#81. I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself.
Harper Lee
#82. I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.
Anthony Marra
#83. I decided to create a really good laptop recording situation and to learn how to write that way, rather than have the perfect stuff around.
St. Lucia
#84. The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It's a soothing falsity.
David Mamet
#85. I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.
Corey Haim
#86. O ay, letters - I had letters - I am persecuted with letters - I hate letters - nobody knows how to write letters; and yet one has 'em, one does not know why - they serve one to pin up one's hair.
William Congreve
#87. What makes for freedom and fluency in the practice of writing? Knowledge of how to write. The same goes for the practice of playing an instrument. It follows that, in the conduct of life, there must be a science to living well.
Epictetus
#88. I think most people agree there is a component of skill in art making; you have to learn grammar before you learn how to write.
Chris Van Allsburg
#89. I'm still trying to figure out how to write about cancer and my family's experience with it. If I had been able to write 'The Pura Principle' back in those days, I'm positive it would have had no humor in it. Which means the story would have been false.
Junot Diaz
#90. I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#91. If only we still knew how to write instead of just type things into our scribes. Then I could write them down again someday. Then I might be able to have them when I am old.
Ally Condie
#92. It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.
Barry Mann
#93. You never figure out how to write a novel; you just learn how to write the novel that you're on.
Amy Cuddy
#94. I've concluded that getting the categories right is an absolutely crucial step to building useful management theory, and unfortunately too few writers do this. You've got to engage in serious scholarship, and then figure out how to write it in a way that lots of people can understand.
Clayton Christensen
#95. You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
Annie Proulx
#96. I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight.
Albert King
#97. I never think that any writer can teach someone how to write.
Mary Balogh
#98. I is reading it hundreds of times,' the BFG said. 'And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.'
Sophie took the book out of his hand. 'Nicholas Nickleby,' she read aloud.
'By Dahl's Chickens,' the BFG said.
Roald Dahl
#99. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985)
Kurt Vonnegut
#100. I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.
Lucy Hale
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