Top 100 Quotes About Not Writing
#1. I am not writing in metaphors. I am writing about catastrophes.
Aharon Appelfeld
#2. I'm a lazy writer. My idea of heaven is not writing. On the other hand, I'm obviously compulsive about it.
Stephen Sondheim
#3. I'm always writing - its what I like to do. But when I'm not writing, I'm reading.
Michael Scott
#4. When you are not writing, you are a writer too. It doesn't leave you.
Natalie Goldberg
#5. I started being me about the songs, not writing objectively, but subjectively. I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that - not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.
John Lennon
#6. I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Kurt Vonnegut
#7. I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
Harold Pinter
#8. If I'm not writing well, I'm not happy. If I'm not spending enough time with my family, I'm not happy. If I'm not connecting to friends or if I don't work out enough ... You get the point. Everything has to be balanced. Nothing should be an extreme.
Harlan Coben
#9. I will probably write an hour a day and spend eight hours a day biting my knuckle and worrying about not writing.
David Foster Wallace
#10. Peacefully ensconced in a small house on the outskirts of somewhere or other, enjoying a tranquillity in which I won't write the works I don't write now, and to keep on not writing them I'll come up with even better excuses than the ones I use today to elude myself.
Fernando Pessoa
#11. Writing is a mixed blessing. We, who are addicted, berate ourselves and feel guilty when we don't write and at the same time put it off and hunt for diversions. Why? Because the this that makes us the happiest is also tedious, hard and frustrating. Writing makes us crazy; not writing even crazier.
Marcia Preston
#12. Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.
Ernest Hemingway,
#13. I'm not writing non-fiction. I don't feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
John Irving
#14. Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank.
Lydia Davis
#15. If you're an actor, if you're not writing as well, or you're not going to improv classes, there are long spurts where you're not physically in production - unless you're Channing Tatum at this moment right now - where you need to be doing something.
Bret Harrison
#16. Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.
Bill Bryson
#17. You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.
Guy Kawasaki
#18. When not writing and directing, my bread and butter comes from acting and stunt work. I've been fortunate enough to be part of some amazing productions.
Mike Mayhall
#19. Women are the essential part of the theater but the writers are not writing about women. I think they're too perplexed about the whole female situation probably.
Bette Davis
#20. Everything can be going well, but if I'm not writing, I'm not happy. When I'm writing well, I'm like a different person.
Aaron Sorkin
#21. I never conceived of not writing a novel. I believed - oh, God, I believed, it was an article of faith! - I was born to write a novel.
Cynthia Ozick
#22. Actually, I can't remember when I was not writing.
Gore Vidal
#23. People can be cruel,' he says with a sympathetic look that makes me trust him even more. And right then I realize that he is not writing down all my words in a file, which I really appreciate, let me tell you.
Matthew Quick
#24. I had this bad habit of not writing out a first draft and going back. For me it was the first sentence, then the second sentence, and I might be several weeks on the first page instead of writing a draft and trying to figure it out from there.
Donald Ray Pollock
#25. If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.
Quentin Tarantino
#26. For me, most of the anxiety and difficulty of writing takes place in the act of not writing. It's the procrastination, the thinking about writing that's difficult.
Adam Mansbach
#27. When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.
Linn Ullmann
#28. This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf
#29. I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.
Alice McDermott
#30. All of the guys love to take serious topics and go for it; we're not writing a whole lot of love songs. With 'Sacrificed Sons,' we had some sensitivity there about how we'd present it. I remember there was a lot of discussion about the kind of words that would be used and how direct we wanted to be.
Jordan Rudess
#31. I write every day. Even if I'm not writing well, I write through it. I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank one.
Nora Roberts
#33. I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.
Melissa Rosenberg
#34. Remember,
you were a writer
before
you ever
put
pen to paper.
just because you were not writing
externally.
does not mean you were not writing
internally.
Nayyirah Waheed
#35. I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.
Fran Lebowitz
#36. I should be working and not writing you. But this is a missing you, where are you, hello and necessary for my soul.
Anne Sexton
#37. Write until it becomes as natural as breathing. Write until not writing makes you anxious.
Unknown
#38. I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.
Georges Simenon
#39. I had made all these rules for myself: I'm not writing social commentary, I'm not writing love songs.
Joni Mitchell
#40. Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that drips
from my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and it
throbs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
#41. Capote's rejoinder to the Kerouac assertion that he never needed to edit his writing: "That's not writing .That's typing.
Joseph Cavano
#42. With a television series, there's a hard deadline, and so you have to write even when you're not writing well.
Aaron Sorkin
#43. When I'm fishing, I feel guilty that I'm not writing, and when I'm writing, I feel guilty that I'm not fishing. But when push comes to shove, I'll always take the writing.
Raymond Carver
#44. One reason for not writing a lost-in-the-funhouse story is that either everybody's felt what Ambrose feels, in which case it goes without saying, or else no normal person feels such things, in which case Ambrose is a freak.
John Barth
#45. When I'm writing solitude feels very good. But when I'm not writing it feels lonely ... Having a big family solves that problem.
Michael Chabon
#46. Capote's rejoinder to Kerouac's assertion that he never needed to edit his work ... But, that's not writing . That's typing.
Truman Capote
#47. I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph.
James Thurber
#49. Myself, I knew a writer - not your father - who once told me his worst day writing was better than his best day not writing.
Jane Lotter
#50. The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.
Marjane Satrapi
#51. Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
Meg Cabot
#52. I'm not writing fairy tales or object lessons.
Junot Diaz
#53. I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.
Michael Connelly
#54. If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.
Francine Prose
#55. Writing blog posts is totally freeing in a whole new way for me. I'm not writing it for any editor, and I'm not being paid, so I can say whatever I want. I don't have to justify the cost of a book to readers; they get it for free, so expectations are naturally low. (And no one-star reviews!)
Kate Christensen
#56. The New Kids took some hits for, you know, not writing their own music. But on a songwriting standpoint, I mean, I'd never written music before when I was in the group, ... Now the music is my music, so it's kind of like my baby, and that was a whole different experience.
Joey McIntyre
#57. I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.
Donald Ray Pollock
#58. Shakespeare is not writing Christian fantasy but Christian realism, and this entails martyrdom and suffering on the part of the innocent. This is the real world in which Shakespeare found himself.
William Shakespeare
#59. Ireland is a wonderful place to write in. Even although the atmosphere was so Faith-laden that I was often worried that I was not writing a book to the glory of God, I had to admit that words flowed from my pen like all-get-out. To be honest, there is nothing to do in Ireland but write.
Nancy Spain
#60. A cookbook is not like being an author. It's writing down recipes; it's not writing.
Grant Achatz
#61. There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.
Sally Mann
#62. Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
Harlan Coben
#63. There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments - moments of sustained creation - when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.
E.B. White
#65. I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.
Daphne Gottlieb
#66. It takes me awhile to find something that I'm passionate about. I'm reading a lot and thinking a lot, and torturing myself a lot because I'm feeling really guilty for not writing something today.
Paul Haggis
#67. I've discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.
Anna Quindlen
#68. You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you.
Robert Galbraith
#69. The goal is not writing. The goal is being a human being writing.
Barry B. Longyear
#70. In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.
Wendy Cope
#71. I'm an attorney when I'm not writing comics, and have been for years. That's a side of my life I don't always associate with pure creativity, but it's all worked out nicely.
Charles Soule
#72. Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production.
Clive Thompson
#73. I'm not writing to make anyone's children feel safe.
J.K. Rowling
#74. Writers talk about the agony of writing; I talk about the agony of not writing.
Laura Z. Hobson
#75. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
Wislawa Szymborska
#76. When I'm directing, I'm pretty much not writing, but when I'm not directing I am writing a lot. It's strange: people have asked me what my schedule is and what is my process like, and I can't even answer it. I don't keep regular hours.
Adam Rapp
#77. I cannot remember the time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be a writer...I was an indefatigable scribbler
L.M. Montgomery
#78. It's not publishing that matters; it's not writing that matters. What matters is feeling alive while writing, washing dishes, driving, etc. Writing just gives you a solid place to land some of that God energy that is already within you.
Barbara Robinette Moss
#79. Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.
Fran Lebowitz
#80. Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.'
Matthew Tobin Anderson
#81. I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.
Kathy Reichs
#82. I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
Tom Stoppard
#83. When you start to write, things begin to come into focus in a way they don't when you're not writing. It's a very good way to find out how much you don't know because you learn specifically what you need to know that you don't know at the moment by writing.
David McCullough
#84. It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's fear of not writing well; something quite different.
Scott Berkun
#86. if you are satisfied with your first draft you are not writing, you are excreting
Jennifer Ross
#87. Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.
Gavin Bryars
#88. I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.
Quentin Tarantino
#89. Only a natural writer could sound as if she is not writing so much as thinking on the page.
Francine Prose
#90. I'm not writing about things other women do. I'm writing for other women to have more self-confidence because I need it myself! And if more women were in power, I would feel more comfortable.
Sheryl Sandberg
#91. All of a sudden, I sort of started to feel that I was constrained by the characters as opposed to enjoying them. And that remains for me to this day the line that I know where it's like, OK, you're not writing fan fiction anymore.
Naomi Novik
#92. I always knew I was going to grow up to be a storyteller; that's one of the earliest things I remember about myself. There was never a question of me not writing.
Regina Doman
#93. Good thing you're not writing the press release.
Adam Schiff
#94. It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
Naveen Andrews
#95. If you're going to cheat and take people's history and you're not writing the Bible, you ain't really so great. But if you try to do it in a way that doesn't hurt too many people, then you probably can get out of bed in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror.
James McBride
#96. Don't not ever stop not writing nothing.
Sam Sykes
#97. Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E.L. Doctorow
#98. Everytime a lawyer writes something, he is not writing for posterity, he is writing something so that endless others of his craft can make a living out of trying to figure out what he said. Course perhaps he really haden't said anything, that's what makes it so hard to explain.
Will Rogers
#99. Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing- singing, laughing, learning.
Sylvia Plath
#100. Some of my poems indicate that I am writing while living alone after a split with a woman, and I've had many splits with women. I need solitude more often when I'm not writing than when I am.
Charles Bukowski
