Quotes About Writing In The Discipline

#1. Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write.

Harper Lee

#2. In fact, "talent" is as common as mud; what's rare is the motivation to sit down and actually do something with one's talent, the discipline to do it regularly, and the persistence to stick with it until it's finished.

Patricia C. Wrede

#3. I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight.

Venerable Bede

#4. The only difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is discipline.

Ayelet Waldman

#5. Writing is a discipline: it's almost all about holding back.

Rachel Cusk

#6. I was a waitress for nine years, which I don't regret at all. It taught me about discipline. I was always writing; it took a long time to make a career of it.

Eve Ensler

#7. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Robert McKee

#8. I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#9. Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.

E.L. Konigsburg

#10. What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#11. People think writers are always feeling inspired. That's only about 5% of it. 95% is the daily discipline to just sit and write.

Bruce Van Horn

#12. I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the discipline is to quit.

Barbara Kingsolver

#13. Art can't be taught; passion can't be taught; discipline can't be taught; but craft can be taught. And writing is both an art and a craft.

Elizabeth George

#14. As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

Rosanne Cash

#15. For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

Philip Roth

#16. As for discipline - it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#17. I'm not a big believer in disciplined writers. What does discipline mean? The writer who forces himself to sit down and write for seven hours every day might be wasting those seven hours if he's not in the mood and doesn't feel the juice. I don't think discipline equals creativity.

Bret Easton Ellis

#18. Writing for me is a form of spiritual discipline and creative vision, a means of being in the world and giving one's love to it without compromise or dilution.

Aberjhani

#19. Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Jeanette Winterson

#20. Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.

Andrew S. Grove

#21. This is the secret to mastering any discipline: as you conquer one, you'll find it easier to tackle another.

Jeff Goins

#22. The whole idea is that the combination of tight activity and slack activity allows me to be both productive and creative at the same time. In the four years that I am actually working in a proper job, I am earning money and I'm also writing with a lot of discipline on the side.

Karan Bajaj

#23. A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer's block.

Ryan Lilly

#24. Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

Jonathan Lethem

#25. I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

Conor Oberst

#26. Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

Peter Benchley

#27. If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

Neil Gaiman

#28. It is only through having a stable loving partnership that I began to feel in control enough to attempt a strict writing discipline, to realize something I always knew was simmering underneath.

Kate Zambreno

#29. Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth.

Ron Brackin

#30. I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

Enya

#31. Good writing like good sex requires discipline.

Chloe Thurlow

#32. To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Everyday. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it's heartbreak most of the time.

Harper Lee

#33. Fearlessness, absolutely. Discipline. You also need open-minded creativeness that lets everything in. You never want to lose a word or a phrase, yet every one should count. Always the best language possible. And, finally, knowing when to leave it alone. Stop when it's done.

Ben Harper

#34. I like the discipline of writing a script. You can't go into the character's head - you have to find these creative ways to help externalize what they're thinking.

Gillian Flynn

#35. It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

Ann Patchett

#36. Discipline is what makes a writer. If writing was like lifting weights, then I'd look like Mr. Universe. Write every day. Give the Muse a chance to get to know you.

Tony D'Souza

#37. The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.

Jeffrey Archer

#38. As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.

Robert Darnton

#39. Whether it's a letter, song lyrics, part of a novel, or instructions on how to fix a kitchen sink, it's writing. You keep your craft honed, you acquire the discipline to finish things. You turn into a self-taskmaster.

Jimmy Buffett

#40. Of all the disciplines involved in making anything - TV, film or anything I do - the writing is the most valuable commodity.

Ricky Gervais

#41. I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later ... Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.

Ryan C. Gordon

#42. Writing for Mills and Boon taught me a lot of discipline. You have to produce books in a short time scale and four a year, and it teaches you a lot.

Penny Jordan

#43. Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate
web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing.

Eugene H. Peterson

#44. The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.

Jesse Kellerman

#45. I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

John Dalton

#46. The discipline of writing a memoir comes in the editing. This is where I cut, slash, and burn - where my creative mind is transformed into a ruthless one. No word escapes my scrutiny. It is here where I see what boundaries need to be set.

Terry Tempest Williams

#47. It can be done. It will be done.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#48. The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#49. We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

Steven Pressfield

#50. For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Louis Menand

#51. The danger of these collaborations across disciplines is in having too strict of a division of labor - in my case, of getting stuck doing the music. When I make an album, I write music, I write lyrics, I come up with the visual design, etc. I get to do all of that stuff.

David Grubbs

#52. Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

#53. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.

Pat Conroy

#54. You're not going to be a writer someday. You're a writer today. Discipline yourself to write and take time to enjoy writing. Do it a lot. Have fun with it. Begin now.

Jack Heffron

#55. Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle.

Stephen King

#56. My writing practice taught me the important thing is steadfastness. It's not necessarily discipline. Discipline can become a prison. When your spiritual practices become another thing for you to be anxious about, they've lost their usefulness.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#57. Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that.

Pearl Cleage

#58. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.

Madeleine L'Engle

#59. 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,

#60. To this day George Sr. is the soft touch and I'm the enforcer. I'm the one who writes them a letter and says 'Shape up!' He writes, 'You're marvelous.'

Barbara Bush

#61. Since the Middle Ages, people have been writing about angels. Angelology was actually at one point a scholastic discipline.

Danielle Trussoni

#62. Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

Thom Mayne

#63. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Madeleine L'Engle

#64. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.

Patti Smith

#65. 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

#66. We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being.

May Sarton

#67. A writer never finds the time to write. A writer makes it. If you don't have the drive, the discipline, and the desire, then you can have all the talent in the world, and you aren't going to finish a book.

Nora Roberts

#68. One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline ... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

Anne Lamott

#69. Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

Kenneth Atchity

#70. The act of writing if one is conscious of legibility is a wonderful discipline. Our minds, which roil like captured oceans, are forced to order themselves and to send coherent messages through our fingers...writing is like yoga or Thai Chi; it forces our bodies to obey our minds.

Edward St Paige

#71. Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

Pete Townshend

#72. And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

Lawrence Lessig

#73. Next morning I went over to Paul's for coffee and told him I had finished. "Good for you," he said without looking up. "Start the next one today.

Steven Pressfield

#74. By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?

Clive Barker

#75. Writing requires discipline, detailed thinking, good communication skills, a plan of action, clear vision, and a passion for people. CMT Stibbe

C.M.T. Stibbe

#76. Most days, writing simply requires work-ethic, discipline, clarity, focus, time. Other days ... it will demand absolutely everything of you.

Christy Hall

#77. 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

#78. A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling. The discipline of the written word punishes stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you.

John Steinbeck

#79. All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Robert McKee

#80. You've got to work. It's about structure. It's about discipline. It's all these deadly things that your school teacher told you you needed ... You need it.
Jo speaking to Charlie Rose re: writing

J.K. Rowling

#81. Some people may be more gifted than others, but excellence in writing, as in any art form or craft, involves discipline and practice.

James B. Stewart

#82. Have the discipline to listen to and to trust your instincts.

A.D. Posey

#83. You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Michael Chabon

#84. I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

Greg Lake

#85. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.

Annie Dillard

#86. The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

Lee Iacocca