Top 100 It Writing Quotes
#1. Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Ray Bradbury
#2. You get right down to it, writing is no means to self-help. It's scarcely a passing attempt at self-help.
Haruki Murakami
#3. All art, be it writing, painting, film, dance, whatever, is a manipulation of time and space. It's an interpretation and a recreation of the facts, using various artifacts that point us in the direction of our personal truths.
Elisa Lorello
#4. There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.
Marilyn Johnson
#5. There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you.
Enya
#6. In 'Pictures from an Institution,' Randall Jarrell was able to transcend the academic novel by simply ignoring it, writing a comedy with no plot at all beyond his own pleasure in language and humanity itself.
Cathleen Schine
#7. I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.
Lisa Marie Presley
#8. Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.
Louisa May Alcott
#9. What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
Sandra Brown
#11. Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.
Lois Duncan
#12. Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#13. I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.
William Styron
#14. You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.
Iain Banks
#15. My nutritionist says, 'If you bite it, write it.' Writing down everything that you put in your mouth really helps. I don't count a damn calorie. But when I'm really trying to eat healthy, I write everything down. It really holds me accountable and puts me on a healthier path.
Tyra Banks
#16. I, myself, was always recognized ... as the "slow one" in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was ... an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.
Agatha Christie
#17. I was a pop freak. I love music. Of course, I knew soul because I grew up in it. Writing it and everything. I love soul. But I love a tune that has some meat in it. Something I could hang my hat on. Because music is universal. Therefore, I felt no boundaries.
Isaac Hayes
#18. I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
Tori Kelly
#19. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#20. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.
Louise Doughty
#21. Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.
Pema Chodron
#22. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#23. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.
Tony Kushner
#24. Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.
Alanis Morissette
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.
Patti Smith
#28. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
#29. I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.
Jami Attenberg
#30. 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
#31. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
#32. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.
Francois Mauriac
#33. It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.
S.A. Tawks
#34. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#35. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#36. Write what you want to write; don't fear about who will read it.
Debasish Mridha
#37. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.
Jessica Valenti
#38. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#39. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
#40. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#41. Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.
John Wesley
#42. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
#43. I can't write - out of all the things it takes to make music, lyrics are the thing I'm by far the shittiest at.
Jay Watson
#44. I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.
Markus Zusak
#45. If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Gertrude Stein
#46. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#47. Keep writing. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Put some words on paper. You never know what will happen.
L.T. Brooks
#48. One thing that's paramount in my life is that I am alone. I'm a loner. And yet I have many friends and I don't feel lonely. And I even like my own company. But when I'm alone, it's to read or write. I'm in my thoughts. Mostly I'm learning.
Agnes Denes
#49. Packs a Huge Emotional Punch! Graceful Writing, Great Acting, Exquisite Direction, Suspense, Profound Subject Matter and It Rocks!
Rex Reed
#50. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.
Joan Didion
#51. Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.
Peter Gould
#52. I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.
Elizabeth Strout
#53. A book acts as the getaway car when you need to escape.
Even when you're the one writing it.
Julie Wright
#54. I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them ... But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember.
Michael Scott
#55. I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#56. It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102
Joseph Joubert
#58. All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
Cynthia Ozick
#59. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
Noah Hawley
#60. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#61. The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.
Brian Morton
#62. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#63. I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
#64. I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.
Neil Gaiman
#65. If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Terry Eagleton
#66. I don't spend as much time drawing as I do writing and reading. That's the really work-intensive part. And by the time I have enough material, it's often way past due time to put the comic up, and I'm already behind schedule, and I have to kind of rush it.
Kate Beaton
#67. My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.
Donella H. Meadows
#68. I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.
Noah Baumbach
#69. It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.
Virginia Woolf
#70. 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
#71. Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley Kubrick
#72. If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process.
Taylor Dayne
#73. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Sarah Dessen
#74. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#75. It's good for you to write down your thoughts. It's
therapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think about
life.
Katie Kacvinsky
#76. That's something that seems to happen when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.
Kurt Wagner
#77. Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.
Octavia Butler
#78. I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.
E. Nesbit
#79. I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.
Junot Diaz
#80. These pages are not my confession; they're my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Fernando Pessoa
#81. Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
Charles Stross
#82. Everything is written in my mind, more so due to my lack of vision at this point. After years of vigorous writing, it was more of a challenge to do it without paper or sidekicks. I enjoy a good challenge.
Ab-Soul
#83. Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be.
Lenny Kravitz
#84. Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.
George Bernard Shaw
#85. The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
Bernard DeVoto
#86. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#87. Every separate sector of artistic creation has its own basic rules ... data which govern it. They are contained in the textbooks on these subjects. A professional knows the rules of the game as a matter of course so that he can achieve, in the upper strata above that, a high quality of art.
L. Ron Hubbard
#88. The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
Mary E. Pearson
#89. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.
Christy Hall
#90. Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.
Zooey Deschanel
#91. Now write this: 'The greatest rapture of my life was afforded me on a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush,' and sign it 'James Bond, 007.'
Barbara Carrera
#92. For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
Jonathan Lethem
#93. I like that it's challenging - that when I'm writing, I feel as if I'm pouring everything I have into the story until there's nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore.
Molly Antopol
#94. In my head, when the gales are riding wild,
I steer towards catastrophe
then write about it.
Robin Robertson
#95. I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.
Kiki Dimoula
#96. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P.D. James
#97. Every time I try to write a song, when I sit down and think I'm going to write, I really want to write a song, and it never works out. It's always when it hits me unexpectedly on a plane or right before I go to bed, something like that.
Bruno Mars
#98. Sometimes you control your demons and sometimes it controls you.
J. Limbu
#99. To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.
Erskine Caldwell
#100. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
Neil Gaiman
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