On Writing Quotes

#1. 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

#2. All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Antonin Artaud

#3. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L'Amour

#4. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.

Julian Barnes

#5. The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

Christopher Buckley

#6. If you want to give the devil a message, write it on the bottom of your shoes.

Andrew Wommack

#7. 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

#8. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.

Linda Sue Park

#9. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.

Louise Doughty

#10. I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it.

Christopher Owens

#11. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

Christina Perri

#12. We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

Teresa Mummert

#13. 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

#14. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#15. You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

Markus Zusak

#16. I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth ... We confuse facts with truth.

Farley Mowat

#17. Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

William Goldman

#18. It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.

Tim Cahill

#19. I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.

Buffy Andrews

#20. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

Christy Hall

#21. I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

Daniel Handler

#22. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.

Robert Rankin

#23. 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

#24. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

Kingsley Amis

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

Caroline Kennedy

#28. I'm totally active. I am just this side of hyper. I jog and go to the gym every day. When I'm on the computer, I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm never quiet. My brain is very rarely not engaged. Every now and again I will fall asleep under the parasol in the sun, but that's a rarity.

Suzi Quatro

#29. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Chila Woychik

#30. Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.

Enya

#31. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.

Fennel Hudson

#32. The thrill of seeing my words on a printed page has never faded. Now I've found my niche, my passion. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life.

Marion Smith Collins

#33. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

#34. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Robert Bringhurst

#35. I love the Victorian era, and I always have, but I had a leg up on the writing because I was familiar with a lot of the science from the Victorian era. And that led to a massive interest in the science of this time of history.

Gail Carriger

#36. People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.

Jesse Kellerman

#37. I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing ... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.

Claire Cameron

#38. I write nearly every day. Some days I write for ten or eleven hours. Other days I might only write for three hours. It really depends on how fast the ideas are coming.

J.K. Rowling

#39. You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

#40. I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Francois Mauriac

#41. I was writing my Ph.D. in the late 1980s and was keeping an eye on what was happening in the world. It became obvious to me that Russia couldn't live without computers. I think I worked this out a year before anyone else. I started looking for people who could help import them.

Bidzina Ivanishvili

#42. If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.

Robert Rodriguez

#43. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.

Christy Hall

#44. It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.

S.A. Tawks

#45. 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

#46. Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.

Kate Mosse

#47. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

George Orwell

#48. Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

Julia Cameron

#49. 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

#50. It's not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that's your pool of resources. If you were to write something now, I bet there's a pretty good chance you'd call on your teenage years, your experiences then, stuff you learned then.

Paul McCartney

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.

Louisa May Alcott

#54. I can't think of anything worse than calling Shakespeare 'highbrow,' because on the one hand, it's brilliant writing. But his plays were popular. People went to see them.

Timothy Dalton

#55. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#56. 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

#57. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.

Annie Dillard

#58. And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

Ezra Pound

#59. I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.

Naguib Mahfouz

#60. And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you're done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won't let your Right-brain do it's job ... Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.

Jeff Bollow

#61. Keep writing. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Put some words on paper. You never know what will happen.

L.T. Brooks

#62. The same with the mortgage brokers that were selling people mortgages they couldn't afford. We shouldn't pay them on each mortgage they write. They should have what they call "skin in the game," where they've got to reimburse us if the guy who sold the mortgage defaults.

Richard Thaler

#63. Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.

Chris Campanioni

#64. It wasn't until I was working on 'Tacky' that I admitted to myself that I was writing a series.

Steven Brust

#65. It's not what you lift, it's where you carry it.

David Foster Wallace

#66. If you see it in Strunk and White it's so.

Buffy Andrews

#67. With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing.

Gunter Grass

#68. But by spring, she had again yielded to the tug and tide of his mind, allowing its currents to carry her back across the continent and wash them up on the remote shores of his evergreen island..

Ruth Ozeki

#69. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

Jonathan Franzen

#70. Either way, you wrote the book and now you're complaining about the reviews I'm giving it," I quipped.
"Fair enough." He held up his hands, "I'm going to start writing the sequel which will be considerably less narcissistic. Will you read it?"
"Only if every other girl on campus hasn't.

Tarryn Fisher

#71. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.

Avijeet Das

#72. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.

Gwenda Bond

#73. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.

A.R. Rahman

#74. The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

Charles Caleb Colton

#75. I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.

Isaac Marion

#76. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Martin Sorrell

#77. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.

Irving Howe

#78. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.

Dana Brunetti

#79. 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

#80. I'm a self-taught musician so how I read music is kind of very weak and I kind of read my own version of tablature, I write my own crappy reminders on what I'm playing.

Jason Mraz

#81. I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.

Ben Gibbard

#82. Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

Haruki Murakami

#83. I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.

Sadegh Hedayat

#84. Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

Julia Cameron

#85. Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.

Walter Benjamin

#86. I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

James Surowiecki

#87. It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.

Karl Ove Knausgaard

#88. Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.

Jennifer Lee

#89. 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

#90. Pamphlets on Sabbath writing are in request here I have been applied to for them by several of the old Methodists knowing that I had them to sell before.

John Hawley

#91. I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Donald Miller

#92. 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

#93. With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Nick Cave

#94. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.

Anne Graham Lotz

#95. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

David Foster Wallace

#96. I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.

Lynne Reid Banks

#97. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.

Robin Sacredfire

#98. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!

Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!

Avijeet Das

#99. I'm just very sort of compulsive and lack the ability to keep things in perspective. If I'm not writing or playing guitar or on the microphone or out on the road, I'm cleaning pots and pans or freaking out about some plumbing issue or tweeting.

Marc Maron

#100. The American war-writing tradition is a proud one and booming in this era of the Global War on Terror - at least in the nonfiction realm. Hundreds of memoirs and press accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan have been published since 9/11.

Matt Gallagher