Top 100 No Writing Quotes
#1. No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Thomas Merton
#2. I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
Tea Obreht
#3. My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.
Hannah More
#4. I have no interest in the printed word. I would continue to write if there were no writing and no print. I put my words down for a matter of memory. They are more made to be spoken than to be read.
John Steinbeck
#5. No writing? Your muse isn't speaking to you?'
'She rarely does. International cell charges and whatnot. Besides which, she's flighty and nearly impossible to understand. And she says I always misinterpret her intentions.'
'Muses. What can you do, right?
Kiersten White
#6. No writing is good that does not tend to better mankind in some way or other.
Alexander Pope
#7. A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.
Don Roff
#9. Some weeks there's no writing, and some weeks are full of writing.
Ann Packer
#10. Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that's not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight.
Charles Demuth
#11. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#12. No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#13. No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.
Therese Fowler
#14. I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.
Maggie Stiefvater
#15. Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go ...
Marianne Moore
#16. You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.
Mary Stewart
#17. No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'
Trey Parker
#18. I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.
Barbara Mertz
#19. In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither product utopian trash.
John Berger
#20. I've always been a fan of album covers with no writing on them and have used them a lot in my own groups.
Mark Lanegan
#21. (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
#22. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.
Suzanne Palmieri
#23. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.
Michael Kruger
#24. 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
#25. People talk differently. You can say some things some places you can't say in other places. But me as a film maker, no words are ever going to be off limits in something I write. As long as people use the words, I'm going to report that.
Dax Shepard
#26. Writing for the love of writing. My muse makes no apologies under this pen name. ;)
Amanda Wylde
#27. I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
James A. Michener
#28. 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
#29. The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.
Frank Miller
#30. There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
Haruki Murakami
#31. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.
Henry Miller
#32. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#33. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.
J.K. Rowling
#34. 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
#35. No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#36. 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
#38. Just Keep Writing! Who cares if it's a Saturday, or if you left your laptop at home, or if you're around people? Just write one word, one line, jot down one idea. No matter how little you write, it's movement in the right direction. Forward. Toward completion.
Tammy Ferebee
#39. As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
#40. I would imagine that most of my writing is done spontaneously. I had no intention of writing, and then I'll just walk through the house, and I'll hear this melody, and I'll turn on the tape players and go back to it later on. Some days I'll get 3-5 songs a day.
Andrae Crouch
#41. efforts demonstrated that he had little facility for writing propaganda or even for communicating with a broad audience. No rejoinder was more learned than his treatises, but none was so unreadable.
John Ferling
#42. Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Joyce Carol Oates
#43. Good writing is difficult no matter what the reader's age-and children deserve the best.
Aaron Shepard
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#48. Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek or to give explanations for what I was doing. This freedom lifted me to the heavens - where greater love, one that forgives everything and never allows you to feel abandoned, once again enveloped me.
Paulo Coelho
#49. It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they're writing at all. To have one's writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.
Elizabeth Clements
#50. Here in California, we passed a law against texting while driving. But there's no law preventing you from writing a letter while driving.
Craig Ferguson
#51. 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
#53. There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.
Alanis Morissette
#54. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#55. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#56. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'
Edward Abbey
#57. All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
Cynthia Ozick
#58. I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.
Fran Lebowitz
#59. No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.
Sarah Vowell
#60. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#61. 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
#62. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#63. He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.
Victor Serge
#64. There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
#65. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...
Natalie Goldberg
#66. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#67. But you're sleep, and you're a few miles away, and I have no means to get to you right now, so I'm writing.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#68. So I see no reason why, just because a couple of womenfolk have kicked the bucket, people should start writing religion about them.
Halldor Laxness
#69. So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.
Pliny The Younger
#70. If he can give his readers no reason why they should read his book, except that the events happened to him, it is not a valid book.
Ayn Rand
#71. I started off writing kind of big summer, blockbustery kinds of movies, but at that time, I had no name, nobody knew who I was, and somebody told me I can't write movies that are going to cost $100 million to make and expect someone to buy them; it was just impractical.
David Leslie Johnson
#72. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#73. And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
Octavia Butler
#74. If you mean do I use the guitar when I'm sitting at home writing stuff, then basically no, never. All I would ever write would be stuff that my fingers easily fall into.
Fred Frith
#75. I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.
Robert B. Parker
#76. Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.
Chang-rae Lee
#77. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.
Quentin Tarantino
#78. Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
Etgar Keret
#79. There are people who read Tolstoy or Dostoevski who do not insist that their endings be happy or pleasant or, at least, not be depressing. But if you're writing mysteries - oh, no, you can't have an ending like that. It must be tidy.
Martha Grimes
#80. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.
Elizabeth Held Forsyth
#81. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.
Jane Austen
#82. No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.
Howard Gardner
#83. I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Philip Roth
#84. He starts to hum, a haunting melody. No words ride the music, only the familiar notes of a forgotten song.
A.G. Howard
#85. No one ever tells you that: that there's no method. Writing's a lawless place.
Naomi Wood
#86. There are no definite rules (in writing). You learn as you go.
Winna Efendi
#87. Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
Vijay Seshadri
#88. I can sometimes gaze out of the window, at the sheep, ponies, grazing deer, and numerous woodland folk. It's a wonderful setting in which to write. I live on a dirt road, miles from anywhere, with no neighbors.
Raymond Buckland
#89. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#90. The most basic rule of editing is that if you can't bear to read it, no one else can either. So when you find yourself skimming, commit murder.
Marion Roach Smith
#91. 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
#92. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#93. When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Andres Segovia
#94. No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.
Sophie Hannah
#95. Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Mark Vonnegut
#96. I have no special talent, you know. I never took a writing course before I began to write.
Patricia Reilly Giff
#97. I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.
F. Sionil Jose
#98. I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.
Kurt Vonnegut
#99. 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
#100. No one can tell you what you can and cannot put in your book. So be brave and just write!
Chrys Fey
