Top 100 Quotes About Writing
#1. We all know the old expression, "I'll work my thoughts out on paper." There's something about the pen that focuses the brain in a way that nothing else does. That is why we must have more writing in the schools, more writing in all subjects, not just in English classes.
David McCullough
#2. Once you have a truly massive amount of information integrated as knowledge, then the human-software system will be superhuman, in the same sense that mankind with writing is superhuman compared to mankind before writing.
Douglas Lenat
#3. For me, writing is not a search for explanations but a ramble in quest of what informs a place, a hunt for equivalents.
William Least Heat-Moon
#4. I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.
Maria Semple
#5. Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
Alma Guillermoprieto
#6. As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
Georges Bizet
#7. The paradox of writing is that you're trying to use words to express what words can't express.
Stephen Fischer
#8. I would rather write songs and then practice with the band. Just the band camaraderie is awesome and then writing music and then just listening to it and saying 'Dude, we made that music!' That's really fun.
Sam McCandless
#9. The comedies are not a million laughs on the set. Its business and the dramas are business as well, really. When I'm writing it I struggle more with drama because I started out in comedy.
Woody Allen
#10. A gentleman sitting in spectacles before an old ledger, and writing down pitiful remembrances of his own condition, is a quaint and ridiculous object.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#11. Because every time I think of starships skipping across the galaxy, I imagine Albert Einstein in a policeman's uniform, writing up a ticket.
John Scalzi
#12. Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.
Sanaa Lathan
#13. Every time I think about writing, comedy doesn't interest me in the slightest. I can play comedy, but I don't think in terms of comic dialogue.
Jim Parsons
#14. Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, 'Several Shades of Why' and 'Heavy Blanket,' J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that '80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.
Henry Rollins
#15. I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.
Stephen Greenblatt
#16. I started studying acting, got commercials, and here we are 100 years later. I'm acting and writing and I have a pool and a dog.
Krysten Ritter
#17. When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
Dodie Smith
#18. Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.
Bruce Coville
#19. Writing music is like tasting the sky. It keeps me dreaming in color.
Adam Young
#20. But you've got to have style in whatever you do -- writing, music, painting, fashion, boxing, anything.
Miles Davis
#21. She was also sure that having experienced the act first hand would probably benefit her writing. If anything she should have sex for her job. Yes, she definitely owed it to her readers to go out and have sex.
R.L. Mathewson
#22. Writing a story requires you to understand how the world works, how characters think, how their emotions drive them to do surprising things, and so on. In other words, as a writer, you have to be more than a stylist. You need to learn to become a master of storytelling.
David Farland
#23. I used to be an obsessive outliner - figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.
Robin Wasserman
#24. To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others
Samuel Johnson
#25. My truest passion is writing, so I continue to do that on my own while seeing what all the buzz is about being in front of the camera.
Dylan Penn
#26. He pointed to the board where the word 'alliteration' had been written in handwriting far better than mine, which on good days looks like it came from the hand of a blind doctor writing his own morphine scripts in an earthquake.
Robert Wilder
#27. If anybody won life, David Bowie did, at least as a creative entity in the sense of writing yourself into existence and writing yourself out in such a graceful swoop.
Babatunde Adebimpe
#28. I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.
Ali Liebegott
#29. Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace
it.
Veronica Roth
#30. My teacher has a reading problem. He can't read my writing
Leopold Fechtner
#32. Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature.
Michael P. Anderson
#34. Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.
Roddy Doyle
#35. There is something eternal in the very nature of writing, as is so graphically illustrated by the scriptures themselves. In a very real sense, our properly written histories are a very important part of our family scripture and become a great source of spiritual strength to us and to our posterity
John H. Groberg
#36. I feel the only way I can survive is to spend a lot of time writing songs. I have to have incredible, killer songs that also are hits, or I just don't have a chance.
Dan Hill
#37. What, then, are some of the shifts that have happened in our understanding of the composing process that make a focus on digital writing in the writing workshop that much more compelling?
Troy Hicks
#38. I think the more emotional you are, the better. I'm sort of writing [songs] as I go and I can never tell how it's going to be or how it's going to feel until I get into the studio. But I definitely think it will. I probably can't help but have the emotions in my voice.
Miranda Lambert
#39. Writing is a passion, to write you simply have to just let it flow and get on with it!
Mark Powell
#40. So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything.
William Hazlitt
#41. I held on to those other sources of income for so long because I never wanted to burden my writing with the responsibility of paying for my life.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#43. Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.
Mike Rutherford
#44. It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
Stanley Fish
#45. A lot of my writing is basically about observation, and things that I've seen, either through personal experiences or the experiences of people around me, or society at large.
John Trudell
#46. I'm pretty instinctual when I write, and I really like to get to a point where I'm writing where I don't know what's going to happen next. Usually when I get to that point, something will happen that I find intriguing or interesting, or that will push the fiction in a way that I really like.
Brian Evenson
#47. Writing is talking to yourself-with the hope of being overheard.
Marty Rubin
#48. Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.
Zane Grey
#49. And you know there's nothing like writing a song about someone who's mean to you, and just makes your life miserable ... and then winning a Grammy for it.
Taylor Swift
#50. When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
Tea Obreht
#51. I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone.
Jeff VanderMeer
#52. Writing is 90% procrastination, 8% perspiration, and 6%biscuit
None of it is math.
Almney King
#53. Scarlatti [Kirkpatrick] started writing sonatas when he was 66 and the idea that he ran off 500 or so after he was 66 was just too much for me to resist. It's just great.
Frank Stella
#54. What writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I'm not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time.
Emma Donoghue
#55. Your mind is beautiful. No matter what problems people say you have, every mind is capable of writing something inspiring and beautiful.
B.A. Gabrielle
#56. On the worst day of writing, the work is instructive. On the best day, the act is transcendent.
Chuck Wendig
#57. The prerequisite for writing is having something to say.
Langston Hughes
#58. I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.
Kate Atkinson
#59. I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.
Charles Stross
#60. I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.
Jane Hamilton
#61. What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
Jaron Lanier
#62. Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can't forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.
Natalie Goldberg
#63. Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress truth.
Wole Soyinka
#64. Taylor Swift dates guys so she can write a breakup song about them. I don't think she's dating for love - I think she's dating for creativity. So let's get her off the market and put her in dating detox. If she really wants love, she has to stop writing music about them.
Patti Stanger
#65. When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.
Rufus Wainwright
#66. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one.
Anais Nin
#67. In writing and speaking, three is more satisfying than any other number.
Carmine Gallo
#68. I'm a nudist by trade and hobby. I grew up in LA and I've been fortunate enough to be doing this for a great deal of years; if someone is thinking of me as they're writing something I take it as a huge compliment and hope that it's an interesting character at least.
Martin Starr
#69. I've heard rumors that the Petersons are writing a book. It will be very interesting to see what they have to say, but I don't know anything about the Rochas.
Catherine Crier
#70. When you're writing these things, you're in a room making each other laugh, you really have very little sense of political correctness or incorrectness. This is a question that Europe tends to ask and America doesn't.
Mike Myers
#71. Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read.
Jason Henderson
#72. I have come to the belief that there is not merely an accidental relationship between bad writing and routine sociological research, but a wonderfully pure, integral relationship; the awkwardness is necessary and inevitable.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#73. I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.
Ruth Rendell
#74. I've learned through writing that if something made me feel deeply or anything at all, it was worth it.
Taylor Swift
#75. The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
Ethel Wilson
#76. Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
Virginia Woolf
#77. This is the difference between U.S. Latina/o letters and Latina/o Letters from Latin America: In the United States, writing is a business. In Latin America, writing is life and death.
Daniel Pena
#78. The thing that happens remarkably often is that the people who are writing a dissertation believe they need to speak to me in order to do their dissertation. They need to interview me.
Tom Stoppard
#79. Writing bridges conscious and subconscious mind. It is a psycho-neuromuscular activity and literally imprints the brain.
Stephen Covey
#80. All good writing is persuasive writing; persuading the reader to buy what you're selling, to side with you, to believe the tales you tell.
Ramsey Isler
#81. I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else.
Meg Cabot
#82. Writing, first thing in the morning, captures the labors of my sleep.
Garry Fitchett
#83. That's a huge subject - a writer refusing to do publicity but writing about publicity.
Ann Goldstein
#84. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything.
Isabel Allende
#85. He managed to do this 'tour de force' of styles without ever breaking the narrative structure of the chapter he was writing. It is the most brilliant parody of writing styles that I have ever read.
Frederick Lenz
#86. I'm always writing something. There's always some structure sitting around someplace. There's always things on the computer, things scratched on score paper, legal tablets full of lyrics. It's never not buzzing around me all the time. I'm always doing it.
J. D. Souther
#87. I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.
Kate Atkinson
#88. I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction - from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
Lauren Willig
#89. And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.
Ally Condie
#90. I am a great believer that all the primary research has to be done before principle writing begins. I'm a huge advocate of plotting.
Michael Scott
#91. Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It's good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them message thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them.
Jo Walton
#92. Some truly bad writing, but brilliantly funny at the same time.
"When he was yet a million miles away the bright ring of fire that marked its portal filled the sky in front of him, flexing and twisting like the devil's anus in spasms of immortal agony.
Alan Glasser
#93. The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass ...
Erica Jong
#94. I don't make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan; it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen.
Leslie Marmon Silko
#95. Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
George Murray
#96. My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call.
Cathy Guisewite
#97. I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.
Faith Ringgold
#98. No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#99. I designed all the characters, anyway, and Frank Doyle was doing all the writing. I didn't have any more input on what direction they were going to go with Josie.
Dan DeCarlo
#100. I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.
Neil Gaiman
