Pretty Writing Quotes

#1. I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.

Tom Drury

#2. 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

#3. The writing process for me is pretty much always the same - it's a solitary experience.

Sheryl Crow

#4. When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.

Erin McKeown

#5. 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

#6. Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time
life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Holly Lisle

#7. The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.

Jon Spaihts

#8. I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.

Janis Ian

#9. Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

Kinky Friedman

#10. Every night before you go to bed write down three things good that happened to you that day. That's pretty much all it takes to get a happiness boost over time.

Eric Barker

#11. Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

Stephen King

#12. I hope we find a cure for every major disease, because I'm tired of walking 5K. I'm pretty sure I don't have to sweat for cancer. I'll write a check.

Daniel Tosh

#13. I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

Ann Brashares

#14. Budget grows out of the story. If you're writing a story with people caught in an elevator for most of the film, you're pretty sure it won't be a $200 million movie.

J. Michael Straczynski

#15. People don't gotta like the same stuff. If they did, life would be pretty boring.

Erin Bowman

#16. All of the writing on '30 Rock' is a joy to go into. It's pretty hot stuff.

Elaine Stritch

#17. The history of the development of contemporary writing in Vancouver from 1946 to 1960 is pretty largely a one-man show, and that man was me.

Earle Birney

#18. I love writing things down so pretty much every card I send to friends or family is an over enthusiastic essay. I've written some pretty good ones in my time.

Rae Morris

#19. Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.

Cullen Bunn

#20. It's a bit cliche, but you can't go wrong by writing what you know. Even if you're a horrible writer, your own knowledge and experience is unrivaled. Nobody knows what you know like you know what you know. The way you see things is pretty unique.

Issa Rae

#21. For me, the process always has to be pretty intense. I could never write just two or three days a week. It had to be every day.

Chad Harbach

#22. I don't have a problem baring my emotions in music. That's one of the reasons I'm glad to have music in my life. I'm pretty resilient as far as being a human being. A lot of songs write themselves.

Shelby Lynne

#23. David Mamet's writing is pretty spectacular, obviously. I like the honesty of it; I like how funny it is and how sad it is.

T. R. Knight

#24. When I hit a period of not being able to write music, I get up and walk away. It's pretty mean but it's true.

Lily Allen

#25. I loved publishing; I loved working in the book industry, but I've been writing pretty much nonstop since I was 19. I realized very early on that I would need a day job, and I wanted one that was in books.

Garth Nix

#26. 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

#27. I'm not a real good musician, but I can write [a song] pretty well. I experiment once in a while to see what I can do. I find out the best I can do is stay with ballads.

Marty Robbins

#28. 'Female Convict 701: Scorpion' is based on a manga as is 'Lady Snowblood.' I saw 'Lady Snowblood' in the theater between writing issue three and issue four of the first arc of 'Pretty Deadly,' and I was really surprised how much I was influenced by it.

Kelly Sue DeConnick

#29. I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

Al Yankovic

#30. I am in no way a confident person - except when it comes to what I'm writing. It's just like, this is what I can do, and I have what I think is a pretty strong voice, for better or worse. It's the style I like to write in.

Megan Amram

#31. My writing habits are pretty static. I get up every morning between 6 and 7 am, grab a cup of coffee, say a few prayers, and go downstairs to my office and start writing.

Mitch Albom

#32. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

Paul Theroux

#33. I was embarrassingly well-versed in Marvel lore, so it was pretty easy to slip into that world. But really, already, by the time I'd started writing superhero comics, my dream was really to be writing my own characters.

Brian K. Vaughan

#34. Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.

Robert Adamson

#35. Airplanes". "It was cool to meet people that liked music as much as I did. As soon as we started writing together, it was pretty obvious

Hayley Williams

#36. I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

Sam Weller

#37. A guitar for me is pretty much strictly in the context of writing songs for my band, coming up with ideas with my band, and then being able to perform those songs as best as I can on stage - that's what the guitar for me has always been.

Scott Ian

#38. Songs are pretty easy. They are small, they are modular, they are about as big as a bagel. They are easy to build. Films are overwhelming in their magnitude and scope. By comparison, a lot of film directors wish they were writing songs because you can do it while getting your hair cut.

Tom Waits

#39. I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing.

Masha Tupitsyn

#40. There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

Susan Bell

#41. Thees and thous taunted her, but like a child, she ignored the writing and focused on the pretty pictures.

Kimberly Spencer

#42. Since truth is often stranger than fiction, fiction needs to be pretty weird.

Erik Meyer

#43. A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair; and some great stories have neither.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#44. Stephen King, by far, is the standard-bearer. I think anyone who writes suspense fiction and says that King isn't an influence is either lying or being foolish. I read his book 'On Writing' before I read pretty much any of his fiction.

Michael Koryta

#45. There is a huge difference between writing a book, which is a private activity I engage in with myself, and wanting to engage in overly intimate personal conversations with strangers, which I pretty much never want to do.

Michelle Tea

#46. Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

Joan Silber

#47. Don't beat yourself up, son. I'm sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock 'n roll, or practice words. That shit's pretty as well.

R.X. Bird

#48. Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.

Sarah Kay

#49. Writing a story is pretty all-consuming for me - it feels a lot like method acting, and for the eight or twelve or fifteen months that I'm working on a story, I'm constantly thinking about how my narrator would react to whatever tangled situation I'm in.

Molly Antopol

#50. I'm pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it's only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.

James Rollins

#51. Writing is pretty flexible work, don't you think? If you want to surf, you just have to get a lot done when the waves are lousy. That's what I'm always telling myself, anyway - write while the surf's down!

William Finnegan

#52. I'm a very melody-driven writer and I have a rule that I don't write anything down because if I can't remember the melody than it wasn't worth remembering. So it's my way to test myself in the studio. When I was a kid I could sing pretty well so melody always made a lot of sense to me.

Justin Timberlake

#53. As a kid, I pretty much got nothing but scorn, and occasionally active animus, for writing fantasy and squirreling it away in my closet and, later, under the mattress supports in my bed.

Sherwood Smith

#54. The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.

Jamaica Kincaid

#55. And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

Larry Niven

#56. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Kevin Barry

#57. When the label came to me to say, 'would you like to do another record,' I said, 'Well I got these sixteen songs sitting here, so let's do it.' And that was pretty much it ... I never stopped writing, it's just the way that the business is now; you just try to find a different model.

Brian McKnight

#58. Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.

Andre Dubus III

#59. Like with anything, good writing suggest itself pretty strongly.

Martin Freeman

#60. When I decided to take writing seriously, I did a lot of reading and analyzing of the books I liked, and came up with what I thought were pretty sound plotting and structure basics.

George Stephen

#61. I pretty much spent my twenties as a musician and taking acting classes. I loved it. I was at UCLA getting As and Bs in English and creative writing, basically trying to stay out of the Army. All I really wanted to do was play music.

Robert David Hall

#62. I'm pretty grounded on my own passion - writing books, you know, doing programs, speaking around the country. And I love what I do.

Stedman Graham

#63. I like to begin every screenplay with a burst of delusional self-confidence. It tends to fade pretty quickly, but (for me, at least) there doesn't seem to be any other way to start writing a script.

Michael Arndt

#64. I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.

Tim Cahill

#65. We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

Chad Smith

#66. Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

Paolo Bacigalupi

#67. I'm pretty much living my dream job, but one day I would love to dedicate more time to writing and performing my own music.

Kendall Schmidt

#68. He did once say the time to worry is when they stop writing about you but again I think that was pretty token of the coverage was very respectful, he rather resented the intrusions on his private life, but that was about it.

Anthony Holden

#69. I'd studied 16th century science and magic. I thought it was strange that people were interested in the same kinds of things my research was about. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it became and pretty soon I was writing a novel about a reluctant witch and a 1500-year-old vampire.

Deborah Harkness

#70. I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read 'The Jungle' in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.

Paul Thomas Anderson

#71. {Y}ou make do with what you're given, and I've spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It's the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own.

Norman Lock

#72. I do a lot. I don't like to sit still. I am pretty spontaneous. I like to cook a lot. I like to eat. I like to workout, surf, read, write, and create. I am always working on a couple of projects that I always have and need to put more time into.

Michael B. Jordan

#73. I am pretty interested in trying to write and produce an animated film at some point, but that's a job that takes several years, minimum, to get an animated movie going.

David X. Cohen

#74. I think that's pretty crucial for it to succeed and be something more than just something you put your kid in front of and turn on the DVD. We wouldn't have got involved if it were just for little kids. We wanted to write something that works on both levels.

John Francis Daley

#75. It's pretty interesting how it all started out. After The Voice, I got introduced to some of my publishing people. We were out in Los Angeles and they said to give them a call when the show was all said and done and they'd get me into the writing world.

Curtis Grimes

#76. I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing.

Jennifer Echols

#77. We all decided that from the start, me and Richey can't write music but we can write lyrics and look pretty tarty.

Nicky Wire

#78. I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

#79. The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one's papers and identification pretty much in order.

Stephen King

#80. But Katherine is different from all of those other girls. She never wanted anything to do with me, writing me off as some kind of filthy manwhore. That fact makes me respect her as a good judge of character, since it's pretty accurate.

Sabrina Paige

#81. My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

Daniel Handler

#82. A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.

Mac DeMarco

#83. It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

Taylor Swift

#84. I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.

Jami Attenberg

#85. Going into the second arc, I'm making a conscious effort to do something I say I never do, which is to change my style because of feedback. I'm trying to make 'Pretty Deadly' more accessible by being more clear in the writing.

Kelly Sue DeConnick

#86. The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

Stephen King

#87. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.

Jami Attenberg

#88. It was written in a red felt marker, and his first thought was that it was from Sarah, though it didn't look like a girl's writing. A girl would make it pretty, with kisses and smiley faces, and she would do it in colored pens and make an envelope as well.

Todd Young

#89. I don't mind writing so I didn't find that difficult, it's just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it's pretty neat.

David Cronenberg

#90. The first draft you're pretty much on your own, so I love that. I can let my imagination go wild. I just go crazy. Then, over the years - it takes years to write these things, to make these things come to pass - there are many, many, many drafts. For Maleficent, there were at least 15.

Linda Woolverton

#91. I write pretty much when I can. I used to be very particular about needing certain conditions for writing, but when I had children, I discovered that I was a lot more flexible than I thought.

Ann Packer

#92. I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.

Winona Ryder

#93. I actually write some pretty tough jokes. I don't want to push the "soft" angle too much.

Allison Silverman

#94. I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#95. Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

Joanne Harris

#96. I've been writing 'Green Lantern' for a long time, and one of the reasons I've enjoyed it is because the depth of stories you can tell is pretty endless with space and everything.

Geoff Johns

#97. People like me write because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate. Our articulation is our writing.

William Trevor

#98. The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

Trent Reznor

#99. I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Leni Zumas

#100. It's pretty easy to think of the idea of a story, and maybe even to write a scene or two, but understanding the ebb and flow of a narrative, where to leave the little clues your protagonist (and reader) need, while playing fair, takes a lot more skill and patience than you might think.

Dennis Green