Quotes About Writing

#1. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is as boring as shit.

Chuck Klosterman

#2. I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.

Jack Black

#3. Thinking about writing isn't writing. Planning to write isn't writing. Neither is talking about it, posting about it, or complaining how hard it is. These may be part of the process. But only writing is writing.

Jack Ketchum

#4. All you need is coffee, some cigarettes, and a Twitter account and your writing career begins! How far you go is determined by the followers you call friends.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#5. I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.

Edward Abbey

#6. Mary Daheim writes with wit, wisdom, and a big heart. I love her books.

Carolyn Hart

#7. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

Norman Lock

#8. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.

Robert McKee

#9. Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.

John Gardner

#10. Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

Gore Vidal

#11. The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Walter Savage Landor

#12. I started writing to save my life.

Joy Harjo

#13. I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.

Jesse Eisenberg

#14. 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

#15. Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.

Mary Lee Settle

#16. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place

Unknown

#17. When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can't write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs.

Michael Crichton

#18. Ms. Scarlett always delivers hot, sexy alphas and this isn't any different. Holy smokes, is this ever HOT! Love her writing and the way she spins a story but adds the HOT factor. Her alphas are phenomenal! - JC

Scarlett Avery

#19. I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie.

George R R Martin

#20. Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Ray Bradbury

#21. Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes

#22. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

Virginia Woolf

#23. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.

Augusten Burroughs

#24. A pen transmits the voice of the soul.

Fennel Hudson

#25. Emily wondered whether Artie would be so carefree if he knew The Book Club was performing grand theft imagination.

S.A. Tawks

#26. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.

Suzanne Palmieri

#27. After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper.

Alan Light

#28. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

#29. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.

Michael Kruger

#30. 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

#31. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.

Jane Yolen

#32. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

Lily King

#33. I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

Angel Olsen

#34. Sometimes I create a character from a scrap - a mere mention that has been left behind.

Sara Sheridan

#35. 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

#36. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

Stephen King

#37. Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.

Alex Pareene

#38. He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.

Galt Niederhoffer

#39. 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

#40. You will never know what fascinating book waits within ... Until you start writing!

Isis Charest

#41. I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

William, Saroyan

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

Christopher Buckley

#43. I like to have a title before I start writing.

Sue Monk Kidd

#44. Writing is a product of silence.

Carrie Latet

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

Andrew Wommack

#46. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.

Gita V. Reddy

#47. Writing is thinking in slow motion.

Walter Kaufmann

#48. We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we're actually writing it all the time, every day.

Arianna Huffington

#49. Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.

Sting

#50. Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation - the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.

Peter De Vries

#51. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#52. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Stephen King

#53. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive

Chris Dietzel

#54. 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

#55. I think music, like writing, can be a mirror. Can turn back onto the listener, the viewer, the reader, an experience that they know but they don't know.

Claudia Rankine

#56. You can curse the darkness, or you can dispel it.

A.D. Posey

#57. The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#58. I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column.

George Vecsey

#59. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Carl Sagan

#60. 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

#61. I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.

Geoff Zanelli

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

Louise Doughty

#63. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

Michael Longley

#64. When I was very young in London, I had a bank account, which didn't have a great deal in it. I should think at least every three months the bank manager would call me up and threaten to strangle me because I had no money, and I was writing checks.

Peter Mayle

#65. Being more aware will enable you to have only astonishing impressions, avoiding any of the disappointing experiences like some of those we went through.

Sahara Sanders

#66. Good blurbs are short, sweet, and limited to six. They answer the question Why should I buy this book?

Guy Kawasaki

#67. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

P.G. Wodehouse

#68. 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

#69. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

Mark Strand

#70. All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

Jesse Kellerman

#71. I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

R.L. Stine

#72. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.

Lisa J. Shultz

#73. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

George Saunders

#74. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Avi

#75. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...

Wallace Stegner

#76. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Isadora Duncan

#77. If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

Russell Banks

#78. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Gerald Brenan

#79. Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.

Pema Chodron

#80. A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Baron De Montesquieu

#81. 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

#82. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#83. My favorite way of working is if somebody gives me a piece of music, because I'm quite limited as a player, so it's my favorite thing if somebody gives me a piece of music, and then I can write lyrics and melodies.

Sinead O'Connor

#84. I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#85. Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Niall Williams

#86. I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.

George Sand

#87. Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

John Wayne

#88. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#89. Teach the writer, not the writing.

Lucy Calkins

#90. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

China Mieville

#91. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

Ken Baumann

#92. I'm writing songs to perform, to entertain. And when I'm really trying to get inspired, I go backwards, and I just rap.

Mystikal

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

Teresa Mummert

#94. There are so many ready to write (poor fools!) for the honor and glory of the thing, and there are so many ready to take advantage of this fact, and withhold from needy talent the moral right to a deserved remuneration.

Fanny Fern

#95. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?

Stephen Fry

#96. 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

#97. pencils racing across paper, a sound I like." Marisol

Eileen Granfors

#98. Rittner's Computer Law: Never argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour.

Don Rittner

#99. If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing Double Dahlias in his garden.

David W. Wolfe

#100. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.

David Benioff