Top 100 Quotes About Business Writing
#1. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!
Edan Lepucki
#2. A pathological business, writing, don't you think? Just look what a writer actually does: all that unnatural tense squatting and hunching, all those rituals: pathological!
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
#3. Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.
Robert Galbraith
#4. The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.
Seth Godin
#5. Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.
Nicholas Sparks
#6. I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it's none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can't wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
#7. That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
Jackson Browne
#8. Keep things informal. Talking is the natural way to do business. Writing is great for keeping records and putting down details, but talk generates ideas. Great things come from out luncheon meetings which consist of a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a good idea or two. No martinis.
T. Boone Pickens
#9. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
Gore Vidal
#10. The day you write to please everyone you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.
Frank Miller
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#14. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
#15. As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.
Edward Abbey
#16. 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
#17. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).
Daniel J. Levitin
#18. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.
Amish Tripathi
#19. 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
#20. If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.
Otis Redding
#21. I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
Irvine Welsh
#22. 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.
#24. I realize that a writer's business is setting fire to Piggy Sneed-and trying to save him-again and again; forever.
John Irving
#25. If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics ... but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
Philip Pullman
#26. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.
Ted Allen
#27. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
#28. I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
James Surowiecki
#29. I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.
The day you die.
Yasunari Kawabata
#30. 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
#31. I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.
Jane Green
#32. I've always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the 'market' didn't respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.
M.J. Rose
#33. If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.
S.J Perelman
#34. I'm not the hands-on guy. I like writing the check, and I turn it over to the guys that make it happen, much like the way I ran my business.
Foster Friess
#35. I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.
Butch Hancock
#38. Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.
Sara Sheridan
#39. I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.
Kerry Washington
#40. It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.
Rod Serling
#41. If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.
Guillermo Del Toro
#42. I love what I do. I made my first record in '57. I don't think I'll ever get tired of making records and writing songs and singing and being in the music business.
Ray Stevens
#43. Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can't possibly write a line you do it anyhow.
Henry Denker
#44. The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V.S. Naipaul
#45. The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.
Keith Miller
#46. The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.
Thomas Lennon
#47. I am constantly amazed at how little painters know about painting, writers about writing, merchants about business, manufacturers about manufacturing. Most men just drift.
Sherwood Anderson
#48. Reading and writing were a dangerous business; they made you think.
Gemma Malley
#49. Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.
Sidney Lanier
#50. I don't think an actor's job is to be recognized. I think an actor's job is to facilitate the writing in a way that changes the way people think. No other business does that.
Jeffrey Donovan
#51. About as much business as a cat owner has selling dog food. Or an Olympic swimmer has advertising for downhill ski equipment. Or a nun writing hard core erotica.
Abso-fucking-none.
Laurel Ulen Curtis
#52. Writing is a solitary business. It's just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.
Shannon Celebi
#53. Songwriters might write cynical, world-wise lyrics and constantly talk about money, but most of us are downright naive when it comes to business.
Willie Nelson
#54. I'm not gonna lie ... sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.
Christy Hall
#55. No matter how good it is, your book will not sell itself.
Elinor Florence
#56. I'm not in the speech making business. I'm not in the seminar business. I'm not in the writing book business. I'm in the changing lives business.
Zig Ziglar
#57. As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head.
Flannery O'Connor
#58. Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
Paul Kane
#59. 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
#60. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it. Concentrate and practice every single day.
Otis Redding
#61. I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.
Isabel Allende
#62. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
Joan Didion
#63. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#64. Music business is hard. It's very difficult. And it's not for everyone. Even if you can sing or even if you can write a song, it takes a lot of determination, it takes some kind of thick skin.
John Legend
#65. I think the business of music has really taken a huge hit. There's no doubt about it. But an artist is always going to produce their art, their music. They're going to paint, they're going to write.
Gloria Estefan
#66. Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly.
David Lagercrantz
#67. 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
#68. That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.
Tom Rachman
#69. Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue.
Elmore Leonard
#70. If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.
A. M. Rosenthal
#71. To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!
Lillian Cauldwell
#72. People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.
Kate Morton
#73. It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle.
Christine Lavin
#74. I've finally decided to write about profit for a change
But before I really started I already started to feel lame
Baby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed
Criss Jami
#75. In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, "Can you rewrite this episode before ... 6 p.m.?" So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.
Noah Hawley
#76. Yeah, man I am going to be writing a book soon. The reality of being in a rock band in the music business'.
Steve Brown
#78. If you've got craft, you got game. If you got game, you can write your way in and out of anything. Writing is the best gig in the whole business, as far as I'm concerned. It's the only job where you don't have to wait for someone to tell you what to do. You just sit down and make s**t up.
Robert Mark Kamen
#79. If your business plan depends on suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.
Hugh MacLeod
#80. On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.
Donna Tartt
#81. Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
Gabrielle Zevin
#82. A person who doesn't have a structured way of writing their goals will experience disorder, even in the comfort zone.
Onyi Anyado
#83. When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.
Malachy McCourt
#84. I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.
Agatha Christie
#85. Words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.
Frederick Buechner
#86. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.
Shannon Celebi
#87. Writing is not work. In fact, there's nothing better. Writing is something that if the music business went completely away tomorrow - radio stations quit existing and music quit being popular and it was old hat - I would still write songs.
Toby Keith
#88. Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.
Neil Cross
#89. I don't know if I have good habits, but I'm very devoted to writing. I'm very compulsive about having a project, at least one, and trying to follow the business as much as I can. I keep on top of all the entertainment business news.
Robert Lopez
#90. I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.
Ricky Gervais
#91. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
David Knopfler
#93. Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.
Jerry Pournelle
#94. If you want things to change, you must change. If you want things to get better, you must get better.
Ted Atoka
#95. The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck
#96. People going into a business have to have a plan. It's helpful to write it out, even if you're the only one there to see it and execute it. It's your bible. Stick to it, unless things happen in the market that cause you to change your plan. I do that myself.
Michael Franzese
#97. The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.
William Targ
#98. I've been in this business for a long while, but it's not like I've been waiting tables. Since I started writing, I've only worked on things that I love. I've had a lot of heartbreak, but you don't become an artist and not expect that.
Joss Whedon
#99. One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
Charlie Munger
#100. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.
Janet Evanovich
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
