Top 100 New Writing Quotes
#1. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#3. Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.
Edward M. Lerner
#4. I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers.
Joseph Fiennes
#5. Every new writing project, every new artistic project, needs to be protected so it can grow on its own before it begins to creep out into the world.
Edward Carey
#6. When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.
Nico Muhly
#8. The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.
Tom Stoppard
#9. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.
Augusten Burroughs
#10. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
Michael Longley
#11. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to reconnect with a long-held love.
Gina Greenlee
#12. It took a while to find a passion for another career that was as strong as the passion that I had for football. Once I found it in acting, it was simple. Use the tools you were given from playing football and apply it to your new passion. I have done that through acting, producing and writing.
Maurice Hall
#13. I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors.
Frederick Lenz
#14. She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing "yes" in the sky.
Monique Duval
#15. Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]
Cyril Connolly
#16. I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#17. When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.
Marie Howe
#18. 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
#19. With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.
Jonathan Zittrain
#20. Writing songs about it is a really useful way for me to love New York more, and stay observing it, and not just zone it out.
Frankie Cosmos
#21. Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City ...
Christy Hall
#22. If money can't be made reporting and writing articles, then professionals simply can't do it anymore. Unless we adopt the position that the amateur blogosphere is really capable of taking on the role that the 'New York Times' and CNN play, then we do need solutions for paying for content.
Douglas Rushkoff
#23. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#24. In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes as fluently as Blake and Byron wrote verses.
Freeman Dyson
#25. You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory?
David Filmore
#26. Writing songs does not get any easier, and that might be because I am harder on myself than I was twenty years ago. Hopefully, as we grow older and change, there are fresh topics, new perspectives, or at least there should be.
Dean Wareham
#27. 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
#28. To try something longer, I entered a half-hour radio drama contest with the national public broadcaster, CBC. To my surprise, I won. And that opened doors in film and television, because that broadcaster was looking to cultivate new Canadian talent, especially women who could write.
Karen Walton
#29. To me, New Order split up when Bernard and I stopped writing together. We started Joy Division together; we started New Order together.
Peter Hook
#30. Artists aren't looking for you to write them something; they're looking for you to give them something new.
Ester Dean
#31. If "Been there, done that" isn't your mantra,then make haste down your "bucket list.
Gina Greenlee
#32. Writing is the birth of my closure. Either it splits me open and comes out easy with tears or it pushes me to hysterics. Whichever way, it brings me a new life.
Sandra Proto
#33. You've gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you're studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.
Jennifer Echols
#34. I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography.
June Foray
#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've started working on a new album, I'm writing a new book ... there are a lot of good things on the horizon.
Ace Frehley
#37. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#39. A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.
William Stafford
#40. This one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing
Michael Chabon
#41. Every time you look at a blank piece of paper, you're doing something new. You have to step onto that blank territory and remind yourself the sky didn't fall in the last time you wrote. Writing is a question of overcoming your fears-and everybody has them.
William Zinsser
#42. We also recommit to supporting tribal self-determination, security, and prosperity for all Native Americans. While we cannot erase the scourges or broken promises of our past, we will move ahead together in writing a new, brighter chapter in our joint history.
Barack Obama
#43. We write to find out what we didn't know we knew. We write to know deeper and truer. We write to connect the dots: a whole new constellation.
Carolyn Coman
#44. I wrote my graduate thesis at New York University on hard-boiled fiction from the 1930s and 1940s, so, for about two years, I read nothing but Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Chester Himes. I developed such a love for this kind of writing.
Megan Abbott
#45. Sometimes when you're writing on a ukulele, you're in a totally new land, rhythmically or melodically.
Tift Merritt
#46. Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
Daniel Alarcon
#47. Increase the number of adventures you act on and you'll lighten the weight of regret.
Gina Greenlee
#48. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.
Kathe Koja
#49. Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them;---but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time. [About F. Scott Fitzgerald]
Maxwell Perkins
#50. The big problem with songwriting for me is starting a new song. It's the thing where all the anguish exists, not in the writing of the song, but the starting of the new song.
Nick Cave
#51. Writing papers was the punishment we had to endure for the thrill of discovering new mathematics.
Edward Frenkel
#52. As we travel to new places we gain new perspectives and renew our thinking.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#53. I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.
Barbara Kingsolver
#54. If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.
Poppy Z. Brite
#56. The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.
Max Brooks
#57. No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
Jan Neruda
#58. I was always the observer, trying to understand what was going on. I was always the new kid. Writing became my safe place.
Lisa Unger
#59. Here in New York City you can now walk around smoking weed and all they will do if they see you is write you a ticket. Unfortunately, the ticket will be to a Jets game.
David Letterman
#60. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow Wilson
#61. In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.
Marshall McLuhan
#62. When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.
Kelly Link
#63. It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
Diana Peterfreund
#64. I think we're on a journey ... It was very easy to write about my past in my book, but writing about the present is all a new chapter. I hope that people find this journey fascinating, informative and educational.
Donna Karan
#65. I picked up On The Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch (in that order) in high school. I was blown away. The writing was amazing and the places it took me was even more far out. It opened up new avenues of thinking for me and so I went down the beaten road.
Yony Leyser
#66. I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.
Phil Collins
#67. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?
Jason Lutes
#68. Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Kurt Vonnegut
#69. When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the new Lexus. You have to know what the guy writing the review cares about to understand his take. Does he like sports cars, or does he like Bentleys?
Mike Nichols
#70. I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
Carol Windley
#71. Actually when we stopped New Order I was busier than ever. The only gaps have been while we've been writing.
Peter Hook
#72. If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.
James M. Cain
#73. I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.
DJ Shadow
#74. For me, writing isn't about money and fame. It's about passion, an art form that I want to share with the world, expand the horizons to new worlds, new experiences, and new adventures.
Jason W. Blair
#75. 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
#76. I didn't to be like, "I have to write a new album. I need to get creative."
Shaun Fleming
#77. That's the essence of songcraft: making something everyone can understand yet it still sounds new.
Tristen Gaspadarek
#78. Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.
Ezra Pound
#79. 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
#80. Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy?
William Zinsser
#81. Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.
Lou Reed
#82. Perhaps because the challenges we face in our country are so daunting, we are also tempted by shortcuts. We tell ourselves that if we invent a new acronym, or write a new empowerment charter, we can avoid some of the back-breaking work that sustained progress requires
Helen Zille
#83. I found when I had finished my new lecture that it was a very good house, only the architect had unfortunately omitted the stairs.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#84. Writing may not make you wealthy, but it is one of the few jobs in the world that expands your outlook on life, opens new borders, and nourishes your soul.
J.S. Frankel
#85. The only thing that a man may do that is new, is to write himself on human hearts.
Vachel Lindsay
#86. We expect to keep our writing sessions going until late spring, then to play some new material in a few secret club dates. The record will likely take a long time and may not surface until 1999!
Adrian Belew
#87. My favourite all time quote is from Eileen Gray, the subject of my new book The Interview. She believed, 'to create one must first question everything'. A concept that applies to writing as to life
Eileen Gray
#88. Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St. John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.
Heinrich Heine
#89. When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.
Mike Greenberg
#90. Everyone's life is an evolution of emotions, spirit and beliefs. The storyline changes, plots thicken, main characters mature and new spiritual journeys begin. This is true of inspirational authors. Their books represent only the stages of their life. New triumphs of the soul have yet to be written!
Shannon L. Alder
#91. We have such a young culture that there is an opportunity to contribute wonderful new myths to it, which will be accepted.
Kurt Vonnegut
#92. When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there's your proof.
Dennis Cooper
#93. I'm usually writing in English, and then I'll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I'll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#94. Still not sure about how easily he could be integrated into their posse, Trevor smiled in delighted relief at how tolerantly two of his close friends had received his new identity.
Zack Love
#95. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#96. The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.
Jack Vance
#97. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
#98. I've done that quite often, but I've got to be quite honest ... as much as you would want to only do one at a time, sometimes projects overlap and there's nothing you can do. Sometimes you to have begin writing a new project just as you're finishing off another.
Trevor Rabin
#100. When we finished the tour we had been writing together for a year. We moved forward from there and have just now finished our record. We're having a new record out in the Spring.
Kathy Valentine
