Quotes About Writing Ideas

#1. I write every day ... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

Janet Fitch

#2. I don't know that it's particularly good for my writing process, but I have gotten some very valuable writing ideas and advice through Twitter and Facebook and other social network sites.

Rachel Caine

#3. I'm always writing ideas down and then I stick em in my pocket and put em in that folder so I don't lose them. Like, somebody might say something, and I'll go, oh that's a good line, and that goes in the folder, too. It's kind of an ongoing process for me.

Lucinda Williams

#4. In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

Alan Lightman

#5. 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

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

China Mieville

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

Stephen Fry

#8. Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.

Toby Keith

#9. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.

Paul Raymond Martin

#10. I write nearly every day. Some days I write for ten or eleven hours. Other days I might only write for three hours. It really depends on how fast the ideas are coming.

J.K. Rowling

#11. I am always happy up a ladder with a paintbrush in my hand. And I wish I had more time to spend in the garden - not least because I get good ideas for writing when I'm out there.

Diane Setterfield

#12. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

Cesare Pavese

#13. I tend to write songs fast, so the process usually only lasts around 30 minutes. In the studio is where I really can artistically breathe, and let my ideas flow.

Alan Cohen

#14. It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas. 102

Joseph Joubert

#15. I write to cover a frame of ideas.

H.G.Wells

#16. With writing a song, I've always felt, right from the start, like I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. I don't ever feel there's a font of ideas to fall back on.

Nick Cave

#17. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.

Katherine Anne Porter

#18. Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing ... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle.

Chip Esten

#19. Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

Phil Klay

#20. Sometimes I start with lyrics - rarely - but sometimes I might have an idea for some lyrics that I wanna say. I write them down and figure out how to use that in a melody to write a song.

Leon Bridges

#21. I definitely write about a lot of dreamy, surreal stuff. I do end up going to a surreal world with my music, but I also like the idea of there being really real stuff as well.

Ellie Goulding

#22. Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#23. I get the ideas from everything. Children sometimes think you have to have special experiences to write, but good writing brings out what's special in ordinary things.

Laurence Yep

#24. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

#25. 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

#26. As long as I don't have an idea, I won't write anything.

Patrick Suskind

#27. 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

#28. Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.

Dan Alatorre

#29. The whole process of writing a novel is having this great, beautiful idea and then spoiling it.

Diane Johnson

#30. Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct ...

Joel Achenbach

#31. Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.

John Creasey

#32. I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

Kirby Larson

#33. Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

Francoise Sagan

#34. It's a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one's work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious." Martha

Erik Larson

#35. Sharing our personal stories makes us grateful for experiencing the radiance of being alive. Writing our personal stories documenting our vivid encounters with the larger world and examining our own time-tested ideas shapes the conception of our own being.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#36. I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.

Patricia Robin Woodruff

#37. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

Kurt Vonnegut

#38. Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

Phil Cooke

#39. What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.

John Scalzi

#40. I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

Paul Simon

#41. No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

Jan Neruda

#42. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.

Leah Cypess

#43. I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

J.K. Rowling

#44. We all have ideas, sometimes good ones, not to mention the gift of emotional turmoil that every childhood provides.

Ann Patchett

#45. It's not how great the ideas are. It's about how you write them, to make them great.

Primadonna Angela

#46. I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.

Julian Barnes

#47. Sometimes it takes time to get into what ideas actually mean to you. Even when you're not writing a song, it's like that.

Boots Riley

#48. Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

Rod Serling

#49. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

Aaron Belz

#50. The Novelist, afraid his ideas may be foolish, slyly puts them in the mouth of some other fool and reserves the right to disavow them.

Diane Johnson

#51. Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

Kurt Vonnegut

#52. It was Rick's Rubin idea to have the 'Brooklyn' verse repeat. It already was a story, but having that made it a folk song. Instead of this rambling march of verses, Rick understands that music needs hooks. You need that repeated chorus, that everyone can sing along to.

Scott Avett

#53. I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

DJ Shadow

#54. Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself
it is the occurring which is difficult.

Stephen Leacock

#55. Don't exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought.

Tim Fargo

#56. People ask me whether I think that one day I might wake up one morning and run dry, but I've had the opposite feeling - that I would die before I had time to write all the ideas in my drawer.

Woody Allen

#57. 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

#58. People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question ... I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!

C.K. Webb

#59. The essential key for writing is to write regularly - like it or not - great ideas come often by writing; releasing the subconscious - waiting for inspiration and ideas will not work, but it does help to have a notebook with you all the time for sudden brainstorms or inspiration.

Robert Marc Friedman

#60. There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.

Harrison Birtwistle

#61. I don't come up with ideas, they come to me. I write them down and try to convey what's wrong with me to the audience as best I can.

Iliza Shlesinger

#62. The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.

Eric Weiner

#63. I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

Roger Zelazny

#64. Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

Richard Bach

#65. One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, "Where do you get your ideas?" When people ask me this, my usual response is, "Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.

Patricia C. Wrede

#66. If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

Elmore Leonard

#67. You have to have an eye and a feeling for where things go. Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything.

Masha Tupitsyn

#68. The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

Bill Watterson

#69. Writing is a physical act that engages your body and mind. Putting your words to paper makes your ideas real and concrete. It unites body and mind into one (and they are one). Take ownership of your life. Start by taking ownership of your words.

Mike Cernovich

#70. When you're writing, your mind has a place where the stories happen. With one word, you can get the idea of where you are.

Luis Negron

#71. Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.

Sarah Colliver

#72. It's helpful for me to get ideas - the physical action of painting. Sometimes it frees up your writer brain. It's nice for me now that the writing has become a serious career that painting can become more like a hobby.

Erin Morgenstern

#73. When writing a book, don't think about who is going to see it. Write about how you feel in the moment. Don't let a good idea get away.

B.A. Gabrielle

#74. My introduction to the Brady book was an attempt to nail the exact same idea since Brady addressed the point. And since I write pornography, naturally, something of an obsession for me.

Peter Sotos

#75. Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.

Confucius

#76. I basically have two ways I start writing. Either I'll start with something about myself, or something that happened to me that seemed important, or I'll start with some idea I have that doesn't have much to do with me. But one will always lead to the other.

Chelsea Martin

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

Marty Rubin

#78. There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

Lucinda Williams

#79. I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

Lucille Clifton

#80. I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.

Clarice Lispector

#81. I got an idea: people like news why don't we write the news down on a piece of paper, and we'll gas them up and drive them to everyone's house. I mean, if you were going to say that now, it doesn't sound like a great idea, because there are other ways you can distribute the news.

Biz Stone

#82. I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about ... only out of time to write it in.

Rayne Hall

#83. I like to joke that you usually write more books before death than after death, so that's why I'm doing it. But really, I remain engaged with ideas. There are so many things happening that turn me on and I just want to examine them.

T.C. Boyle

#84. I dont really write with the idea of trying to teach any lessons. I want to tell a story as truthfully and engagingly as I can, and then let the chips fall where they may.

Ann Brashares

#85. In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.

Woody Allen

#86. The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.

H.L. Mencken

#87. I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!

Kate Zambreno

#88. Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress ... the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Robert Anton Wilson

#89. My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

Anais Nin

#90. My job as an actor is to serve the writing and help the author get his ideas across.

Kevin Spacey

#91. The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

Dave Hickey

#92. I find that writing is the silver lining of life, allowing me to transform vexing experiences into fresh story ideas...after much vexed venting.

Laura Quinn

#93. Before I start writing, before I have an idea of where and when the story happens, I research it thoroughly.

Isabel Allende

#94. An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

Umberto Eco

#95. Yet in our enthusiasm for the idea that everyone should be able to read and write fluently, we may be missing a crucial point: in today's culture, finely honed literacy skills are simply not as important as they once were.

Hugh Mackay

#96. ...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about their writing work each day, catching them in the act [of writing].

Katie Wood Ray

#97. 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

#98. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

#99. If something isn't working, if you have a story that you've built and it's blocked and you can't figure it out, take your favorite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It's brutal, but sometimes inevitable.

Joss Whedon

#100. Where do writers get their ideas from? Anywhere and everywhere.
Nothing is sacred.

Darynda Jones