Quotes About Free Writing

#1. I almost never do free writing. Unless I am forcing my students to do it.

Rachel Zucker

#2. A true piece of writing sets you free.

A.D. Posey

#3. By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please.

Criss Jami

#4. I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.

Jorge Luis Borges

#5. I don't write fiction but I do write narrative; I write memoirs that I treat like stories, so whenever I'm using somebody I actually know as a model, I am submitting them to the agenda of a storyteller, and I feel free to do what I want.

Vivian Gornick

#6. All right, you caught me. I'm secretly obsessed with you and spend all my free time writing about you in my journal. 'Dear Diary, today Will was an ass for the 467th day in a row. He's so dreamy

Elizabeth Scott

#7. Always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed ... Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write 'splendid,' but also, 'I don't believe a word of it.' And even 'bullshit.'

Tim Parks

#8. All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well.

Alfred The Great

#9. As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.

Dubravka Ugresic

#10. I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies, but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free, and then I correct it after.

Pedro Almodovar

#11. An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material - the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become.

Gudjon Bergmann

#12. I had a job on a newspaper in Wisconsin, and I started off as most reporters did back then: writing obits and free ad giveaways.

Scott Glenn

#13. You have girls that sing about guys ain't paying their bills and men are this and men are that and I write about women who want to go out for free, they don't want to pay for the dinner, they try to get over, they wanna leave.

Kool Keith

#14. If I ever get some free time I end up thinking about what to make next. I don't pick up a guitar and start playing the songs I already know; I immediately try to write a riff.

Chaz Bundick

#15. What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

Allison K. Williams

#16. ...but for the Girl Writing A Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

William Carpenter

#17. Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Samuel Johnson

#18. The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you're writing about. It doesn't encumber you, it makes you free.

A.S. Byatt

#19. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Stephen King

#20. When I'm writing, I like to travel alone. If you really want to find out about a place, you need to be as free as possible to be spontaneous. You also need to be lonely, because loneliness is a great teacher, too.

Paul Theroux

#21. If, however, the poetic end might have been as well or better attained without sacrifice of technical correctness in such matters, the impossibility is not to be justified, since the description should be, if it can, entirely free from error.

Aristotle.

#22. I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

Lynn Abbey

#23. Will Arnett and I were never in the same room, but once I saw early animation we started writing music for that and then he just kind of did his little rap over top, some of it was free form and some of it I made up, we all just kind of contributed to it.

Mark Mothersbaugh

#24. I've been very lucky, man. Like you say, though, the writing is what kicked all that in and made it possible. It's something that I have always been very thankful of, that that kicked in, and that I could be free with the music.

Tony Joe White

#25. The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

Paul Auster

#26. When your heart starts to feel full again. I love FREE refills, and if a restaurant tries to double charge me, I refuse to write a love poem on their Yelp page.
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz

Karen Quan

#27. I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, "What does it mean to live in Christ?" by saying, "There is no longer Jew or Greek,
there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

John Shelby Spong

#28. Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.

Andre Breton

#29. Education is not simply to learn to read and write. It's emancipation. It makes you free.

Ziauddin Yousafzai

#30. Lirralei was a girl of storm
winds and thorns, the musk of the wild rose and the flight of the falcon.

Rosamund Hodge

#31. Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Robert Frost

#32. Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet ...

Winifred Holtby

#33. Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

John Grisham

#34. Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions.

Vladimir Lenin

#35. I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

Charles Bukowski

#36. If you see me alone with my pen don't get to close to me. I'm writing words that will someday set me free.

Delano Johnson

#37. I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

Chang-rae Lee

#38. Dissecting my linguistic metamorphosis, I realize that I'm trying to get away from something, to free myself. I've been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I've been transformed, almost reborn.

Jhumpa Lahiri

#39. I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn't even look to see if there was water in the pool.

Mavis Gallant

#40. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

David Guterson

#41. I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety, worry, and stress. When my life gets hectic I HAVE to read and write or I'll drown.

Shandy L. Kurth

#42. I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.

James Tagg

#43. As long as one writes only for oneself, writing is a free act by means of which, to use an oxymoron, one secretly opens oneself.

Elena Ferrante

#44. In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.

Miriam Toews

#45. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

Damon Galgut

#46. I'm always in that mode - whenever I have a little free time, I'm always recording songs, writing, whatever I gotta do. It's like my job is my vacation.

Ludacris

#47. I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me. If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free, I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well.

Erland Josephson

#48. The more you read, the more you write, and the more you free yourself to do so, the better writer you will become.

A.D. Posey

#49. In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

Langston Hughes

#50. Writing poetry is a state of free float

Margaret Atwood

#51. It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut - it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.

Stephen King

#52. Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

Jane Yolen

#53. Don't keep your Muse locked up in the closet. Set them free to dance across the page and what they create will be a masterpiece.

Michelle C. Hillstrom

#54. A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#55. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,

Francis A. Schaeffer

#56. When it comes to the college essay, feel free to break some rules. Many still apply, of course: you need to watch your grammar and spell everything correctly. Sentence structure still matters. But the formula that got you A's in English can be a straitjacket when you're writing your college essay.

Cassie Nichols

#57. Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Jessamyn West

#58. The writer's job is to free language from the prison of ideas.

Marty Rubin

#59. Writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better.

Richard Stallman

#60. Self-trust is so important. When you launch on a story, make your neck loose, feel free, good-natured. And be lazy. Feel that you are going to throw it away. Try writing utterly unplanned stories and see what comes out.

Brenda Ueland

#61. The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one's mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.

Fennel Hudson

#62. Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.

David Mamet

#63. We should all live as though someone is writing a book about us.

J.R. Rim

#64. The writer, a free man adressing free men, has only one subject - freedom

Jean-Paul Sartre

#65. Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.

Margaret Foley

#66. Half hating, half loving, this free time between writing books.

K.J. Mecklenfeld

#67. I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.

Christy Hall

#68. 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

#69. Writing with privacy is paramount. You must feel free to admit to yourself your deepest, darkest secrets and true feelings.

Jewel

#70. Don't let society's defined genre hold you down, be a free spirit and just write, let society be the one to decide where each piece fits in.

Uma Nnenna

#71. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.

Bob Dylan

#72. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

Adrienne Rich

#73. 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

#74. I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.

Lauren Oliver

#75. 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

#76. I like writing songs. I like the camarderie of the and. I like touring. I love playing bass. And then there's free beer.

Keanu Reeves

#77. Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Nick Cohen

#78. When you are a free and independent writer, without employer, without hours or deadlines, you have to play little games to force yourself into the actual writing. For me, one game is to announce...that I have finally decided on my next book, that I am ready to write it...to put my pride on the line.

Irving Wallace

#79. I like reading, writing, hiking, camping, free running, surfing, rock climbing, long boarding, and so much more.

Nolan Gould

#80. I am a poet
writing frenetic free verse
I am pretentious

Michael H. Hanson

#81. This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

Franz Kafka

#82. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination

Danielle M. Maistry

#83. Writing is something you Do and not discuss. Talk is cheap, wishes are free and a fool is included with every purchase. So spend your time wisely.

Jaime Reed

#84. I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I've learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively.

Paula McLain

#85. A sign read "Free drinks for billiards competitors only." Hand-lettered below read "All others will pay." It was written in blood. I could tell because a red fairy with what looked like black insect wings was writing it at the time, with his own dismembered finger.

Red Tash

#86. When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."

Natalie Goldberg

#87. I got so good at writing to a budget, my brain was restricting myself. I'd write, It's a stormy night. Then I'd cross out stormy. I'd write: It's a calm night. Then I'd cross out night. It's noon. Because you know how much night costs. You know how much rain costs. Nothing comes free in movies.

Albert Brooks

#88. I'm a Texas girl, with a California soul.

Crystal Woods

#89. I carry around a little journal with me, a little notebook and a pen and just write all the time. Not necessarily actually sitting down and writing lyrics, just free-form writing, whatever's going on in my mind.

Mandy Moore

#90. I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

Tony Gilroy

#91. No rest for me anywhere. No rest from writing, awareness, insights, memories, fantasies, analogies, free associations. Writing becomes imperative for a surcharged head.

Anais Nin

#92. Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

Rose Tremain

#93. My spirit is free. My heart is taken.

Crystal Woods

#94. Writing [for the novelist] is not an activity, but a condition. That is why one simply can't resume the work when one has a job and a free half-day. Reading is the conveyance of this condition.

Robert Musil

#95. I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant..Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.

Richard Aldington

#96. The free-lance writer is one who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.

Robert Benchley

#97. Writing tends to cheer me; it always soothes my spirit and blesses me with the gift of an innocent, tender, childlike day. It is the sensation of having spent a few hours in my homeland, with my customs, free whims, my total freedom.

Gabriela Mistral

#98. When you have somebody writing or acting for you, you have to be free to have them hate you so you can get your ideas across without worrying.

Amy Heckerling

#99. When you choose to write using yourself as the source of the story, you are choosing to confront all the silences in which your story has been protectively wrapped. Your job as a writer is to respectfully, determinedly, free the story from the silences and free yourself from both.

Christina Baldwin

#100. If in my lifetime the problem of non-free software is solved, I could perhaps relax and write software again. But I might instead try to help deal with the world's larger problems. Standing up to an evil system is exhilarating, and now I have a taste for it.

Richard Stallman