Top 100 Quotes About Writing About Life
#1. The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life's traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.
James W. Pennebaker
#2. Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine.
Abraham Verghese
#3. An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
Randall Jarrell
#4. Writing about sex turns out to be just writing about life.
Erica Jong
#5. When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.
Ralph Peters
#6. My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I'm concerned, love is absolutely everything.
Taylor Swift
#7. I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.
Lawrence Weschler
#8. Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.
Joe Eszterhas
#9. Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
Enya
#10. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
Samuel Colbran
#11. Write what you want to write; don't fear about who will read it.
Debasish Mridha
#12. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#13. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
#15. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#16. When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
Erin McKeown
#17. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#18. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#19. I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.
Ray Bradbury
#20. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Cheryl Strayed
#21. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#22. It's good for you to write down your thoughts. It's
therapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think about
life.
Katie Kacvinsky
#23. Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about
Anonymous
#24. I kept writing all these ballads; they're me speaking about life. But how am I gonna do the live show I wanna do if I don't have something I can dance to?
Laura Bell Bundy
#25. And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by.
Avijeet Das
#26. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.
Elizabeth Held Forsyth
#27. You know you've spent a lot of time writing fiction when you meet a new person and instead of asking them about what they do, or where they're from, you ask "what's your backstory?
David Filmore
#28. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#29. The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
#30. There are only two things to write about: life and death.
Edward Albee
#31. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#32. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#33. I definitely write about my life and the issues I might have or the dilemmas I'm going through, but usually I write about it in a general way and make metaphors. Like "I'm the wolf and you are the moon ".
Oh Land
#34. Never ask about the details of someone's personal life, only the quality. Because if they want you to know, they'll let you know. If they don't want you to know, there is no need to know.
S.A. Tawks
#35. We should all live as though someone is writing a book about us.
J.R. Rim
#36. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#37. I came across humanity in Istanbul, and all I know about life comes from Istanbul, and definitely, I am writing about Istanbul. I also love the city because I live there, it has formed me, and it's me. Of course it is natural. If somebody lived all his life in Delhi, he will write about Delhi.
Orhan Pamuk
#39. The greatest thing about writing is that you get to shape more than one life.
Katja Michael
#40. If you're asking if I would be foolish enough, or insulting enough, to write about people in my life that I respect and sell it to the masses as a "break-up song," I can't imagine doing that to people I love.
Jack White
#41. I write about life as it exists within houses and on the streets. And there's nothing, hopefully, in any of my characterizations or in any of my plottings or in any of my valuations that doesn't ring true to life. I'm a novelist. I'm not a theoretician.
Richard Grossman
#42. I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff.
Oliver Sykes
#43. Being passionate about something is the most beautiful characteristic you can develop.
Charlotte Eriksson
#44. The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth.
Maurice Blanchot
#45. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#46. I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.
Pixie Lott
#47. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
Ernest Hemingway,
#48. How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the relationships in my life? Who am I if not where I fit in the world, where I fit in the lives of the people dear to me?
Rabih Alameddine
#49. We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.
Patricia Hampl
#50. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
#51. I think inside every rock journalist, there's somebody who wishes they had the courage to live the life that they're not, and that they're writing about. But at the same time, inside every songwriter, I guess there's a wish for happiness.
Glen Hansard
#52. My life has really been about writing, though some think it's all about once having been in a ball dress and having an odd life and marrying all the time. But it's the writing that's always been the point.
Emma Tennant
#53. I wake up around noon, light a cigarette, get a cup of coffee, sit in the bathtub for an hour and daydream, and I usually come up with some ideas ... It's a very irresponsible life. The only decisions I make are about the notes I'm writing.
Hans Zimmer
#54. I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me.
Stephen King
#55. My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me.
Miley Cyrus
#56. Write what you believe to be true; don't worry about who agrees or disagrees with you.
Debasish Mridha
#57. Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and sotheir house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers most resembles them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. Let me say that I absolutely loved writing 'A Common Life,' because it was a book about love.
Jan Karon
#59. My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about.
Tucker Max
#60. The more I know about God, I am convinced He likes to read books and authors are His librarians. Every soul is a story waiting to be read.
Shannon L. Alder
#61. By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.
Rabih Alameddine
#63. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#64. It's what I wanted to do with my life. Not necessarily just direct Jim Carrey movies, but to direct and act and write and create and along the way discover what it is that I'm about.
Ben Stiller
#65. I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.
Augusten Burroughs
#66. I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about ... only out of time to write it in.
Rayne Hall
#67. It's not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone's life seems to be. That, I think, is what I'm writing about.
Colum McCann
#68. I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.
Jeff Kinney
#69. To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one's life becomes very small.
Paul Auster
#70. I have a foot here and a foot in some spirit world. There are many more layers to reality, and that permeates my life and my writing in a very natural way. I don't even think about it.
Isabel Allende
#71. Creativity and intelligence, rather than violence, are the best problem solvers.
Don Roff
#72. My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
Chris Crutcher
#73. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#74. 'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.
Tess Gerritsen
#75. People really want to believe that there is no fiction. I think they find it much easier to imagine that novelists are writing memoirs, writing about their lives, because it's difficult to conceive that there's a great imaginary life in which you can participate.
Mark Leyner
#76. I like writing people from a slightly sharp angle and then throwing more light on them. I think in life we see somebody and make judgments very quickly about who they are and what they are. Or we think people are boring because they appear ordinary.
Rachel Joyce
#77. I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.
Jay-Z
#78. I just write all the time. In my whole life I've never had what I've heard people talk about writer's block. I've never had that. Life is like a song to me. I just hear everything in music, so I have never once thought "Well, I'm never gonna be able to write again." I've got thousands of songs.
Dolly Parton
#79. The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.
PJ Harvey
#80. When you're teaching creative nonfiction, it helps to have written about your life in a very open way, because you can say, 'Look, how much are you willing to risk emotionally to write? How careful can you be with the other people you're writing about?'
Marya Hornbacher
#81. I grew up with older brothers, adore them, can't imagine going through life without them, and I definitely think I draw on that love when I'm writing about siblings. It's so powerful, the jump-in-front-of-a-train-to-protect-them kind of love.
Jandy Nelson
#82. I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Toni Morrison
#83. When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.
Salman Rushdie
#84. All writers
all beings
are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force ... All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land..
Janet Frame
#85. Come now, I was not about to let that thing eat you.
Stacy Buck
#86. Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.
Alison Bechdel
#87. She decided to make his life as terrible, tragic and complicated as possible, so that some day Percy Jackson would have a really hard time writing about it.
Rick Riordan
#88. Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
Natalie Goldberg
#89. I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
Sue Grafton
#90. That was the great thing about growing up. We got to write our own endings, thousands of them, over and over. That WAS life. It was a million little endings. Even when other people thought we were writing them wrong.
Kim Culbertson
#91. Give me a paper and pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple of bottles of gin, in case I don't get in.
Tupac Shakur
#92. Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.
Patrick White
#93. Readers don't want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions ... Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline.
Randy Ingermanson
#94. As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
Ben Gibbard
#95. Come. when i finish writing, let's take a drive up the PCH with a bottle of cheap wine and talk about these lives we built
Darnell Lamont Walker
#96. I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.
Wallace Shawn
#97. Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person's level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#98. The thing I respond to the most is just great writing, interesting characters. I like to think that there is something fun about playing a character that has a lot of authority in her own life.
Marin Ireland
#99. I never write the storyline ahead of the novel and stick to it like glue. I prefer my writing to be organic. It takes on a life of it's own.
Airam
#100. Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.
Judith Krantz
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