Quotes About Writing Practice

#1. I am always urging my students to honor their writing practice, to set up a schedule.

Tayari Jones

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. It's good to go off and write a novel, but don't stop doing writing practice.

Natalie Goldberg

#5. Read. Write. Read some more. Explore the universe through your writing. Practice and learn what moves you and what doesn't.

Darynda Jones

#6. THE BASIC UNIT of writing practice is the timed exercise.

Natalie Goldberg

#7. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.

Ann Patchett

#8. I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.

Natalie Goldberg

#9. What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind ... The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.

Natalie Goldberg

#10. [T]he one thing I want for you is to recognize when you are really singing in writing practice and honor that. Trust that. When you were screaming on the page. Maybe that doesn't make a whole book but that is the true seed.

Natalie Goldberg

#11. In writing practice, there's no direction. You enter your own mind and follow it where it takes you. We have a great need to connect with our own mind and our own true self. And all of us have a story to tell.

Natalie Goldberg

#12. Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

Natalie Goldberg

#13. If you want to be a rock star, you're not going to just walk on stage. You gotta go practice in the garage until your fingers bleed. I always say that - the same with writing and the same with filmmaking - if it's really your passion, you've just got to stick with it and do it.

Robert Rodriguez

#14. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.

Sam Hamill

#15. What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#16. Read and write with a sensitive ear. The craft of writing is very important. Practice the craft.

Henry Petroski

#17. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

Jennifer Haigh

#18. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

Octavia E. Butler

#19. My hand may slip from lack of practice, but I do not believe my clumsy writing derives from an agitated mind.

Soseki Natsume

#20. No.'
It's not a bad word.
And it is very important to use at times.
Practice saying it in the mirror.
It's empowering.

Christy Hall

#21. When it's time to settle into the serial monogamy inherent in writing a book (although, between you and me, I secretly practice biblio-polygamy - I can't help myself),

Cathleen Rountree

#22. What is Religion according to you?

"Religion is your idea of leading life, the value you not only hold close to your heart but ones that you practice, the passions in your life, the faith in your ideals, the vision you have for your life and the society around you.

Vishwas Mudagal

#23. The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.

Edwidge Danticat

#24. For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,

Alice Munro

#25. 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

#26. Practice writing and speaking about what you do.

Sanford Biggers

#27. Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.

Stanley Fish

#28. Talent is required, but much of writing is a matter of craft, which develops with time, attention, patience and practice, like playing an instrument or learning to dance.

Susan Wiggs

#29. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

Edward Hirsch

#30. The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Fay Weldon

#31. Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something therefore religion can.'

Richard Dawkins

#32. Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to the amount they could say. It was a confidence building assignment too, because what they wrote, even though seemingly trivial, was nevertheless their own thing, not a mimicking of someone else's.

Robert M. Pirsig

#33. My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

Barbara Corcoran

#34. I love Yamaha Clavinovas. I have them at home, in the studio and on tour with me. I find them ideal for all sorts of things: silent practice with headphones at home; writing; arranging and ... just playing the blues!

Jools Holland

#35. Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Lisa Cron

#36. Don't beat yourself up, son. I'm sure there is a culture on this spinning ball of dirt where you can be pretty. If not, do rock 'n roll, or practice words. That shit's pretty as well.

R.X. Bird

#37. You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it. Concentrate and practice every single day.

Otis Redding

#38. Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Nick Cohen

#39. Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale.

Piers Anthony

#40. Basically when I'm walking I'm not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold.

Stephen Vincent Benet

#41. Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

E.B. White

#42. Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

William Styron

#43. Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

#44. Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives.

Ulysses S. Grant

#45. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

Margaret Atwood

#46. Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

Julia Cameron

#47. 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

#48. You see, writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues - and an excuse for handling those issues badly.

David Sax

#49. Real lobbying reform must end the practice of corporate lobbyists writing our laws.

Marty Meehan

#50. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.

Shannon Celebi

#51. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

Julianna Baggott

#52. People should practice an art in order to make their souls grow and not to make money or become famous. Paint a picture. Write.

Kurt Vonnegut

#53. Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

Dani Shapiro

#54. Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#55. You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road.

Colm Toibin

#56. Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? "She drove me to my practice at four in the morning," etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

Paul Theroux

#57. 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

#58. As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

Stephen King

#59. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.

Kathryn Bigelow

#60. I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

Nell Freudenberger

#61. When the whole world is writing letters, it's easy to lap into the quiet within, tell the story of an hour, keep alive the narrating inner life. To be alone in the presence of one's thought is not a value, only a common practice.

Vivian Gornick

#62. Just as you can practice three - word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.

Stanley Fish

#63. No writing effort is ever wasted. At the very least, it's practice, and a writer never knows when he or she might usefully cannibalize an earlier effort for something new.

Therese Fowler

#64. George Smith shows how many of the prophet's followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice ... [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.

Daniel Walker Howe

#65. I do teach fiction and non-fiction, and usually I'm interested in works that confuse genre, but I'm very new to teaching creative writing, I don't have an MFA, or a PhD, I tend to approach it just through my own practice.

Kate Zambreno

#66. Writing is hard ... It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it's no longer a hobby, it's no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

Karina Halle

#67. Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

Wallace Stegner

#68. It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.

Leo Tolstoy

#69. I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

Dana Spiotta

#70. I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.

Michael Cadnum

#71. Writing about my illness put me into places. It was very triggering. I had to completely remove myself and practice self-care. I learned to be patient.

Jenny Lawson

#72. Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission

Judith-Victoria Douglas

#73. Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

Nancy Mairs

#74. Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

Phil Cousineau

#75. It is from the middle class that writers spring, because, it is in the middle class only that the practice of writing is as natural and habitual as hoeing a field or building a house.

Virginia Woolf

#76. There is a lot to be said for collaboration, and it should be seen as just another way to do things as it is in other forms of writing, such as for television, where it is standard practice.

James Patterson

#77. [S]torytelling, in ancient and modern practice, is always a contemplation of the experience of time passing. A story depends on things not standing still, on the built-in condition of impermanence.

Joan Silber

#78. Practice trust in small matters for huge returns in the large ones.

Gina Greenlee

#79. In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.

Bee Wilson

#80. I write because it is while I'm writing that I feel most connected to why we're here. I write because silence is a heavy weight to carry. I write to remember. I write to heal. I write to let the air in. I write as a practice of listening.

Andrea Gibson

#81. My favorite books are a constantly changing list, but one favorite has remained constant: the dictionary. Is the word I want to use spelled practice or practise? The dictionary knows. The dictionary also slows down my writing because it is such interesting reading that I am distracted.

Beverly Cleary

#82. I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Chloe Thurlow

#83. Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

Dave Hickey

#84. Journaling has become one of the most gratifying and fulfilling practices of my life. Not only do I derive the daily benefits of consciously directing my thoughts and putting them in writing, but even more powerful are those I have gained from reviewing my journals.

Hal Elrod

#85. English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Dean Wesley Smith

#86. Like everyone, I was a huge fan of David Boies, and from what I knew about him, I thought he might 'get' me. So I sent him an email. I said I want to practice law but that I didn't want to stop writing and I asked if there was any way I could practice law for him.

Elizabeth Wurtzel

#87. If you're a musician, you can practice your guitar every day and write songs, but when you're an actor, you can't just like burst into a monologue. Your only exercise is when you're in prep or you're working.

Winona Ryder

#88. It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

Geddy Lee

#89. Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed.

Anita Desai

#90. My father told us all the time: to become a good writer takes writing. Because the more you do it, the better you get at it. It's like bull-riding. You can't do it once, you know. You've got to practice it and practice it.

Thomas Steinbeck

#91. My guitar playing has not developed as much as I think it could because I never practice. I only play when I'm writing or recording or when I'm playing on tour. When I'm sitting around at home, I never play.

Juliana Hatfield

#92. The Lord showed me by vision and revelation what would happen if we did not stop this practice ... all ordinances would be stopped ... many men would be made prisoners ... I went before the Lord, and I wrote what the Lord told me to write ...

John Andreas Widtsoe

#93. I've always thought of my writing as a spiritual practice. But I think that fiction is the most supernatural kind of writing that you can do because of the ways that the real and the unreal weave together to create something that feels more true than anything.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#94. I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.

Dani Shapiro

#95. I am uneasy about the practice of other people telling you how to write. This is especially true for beginners who haven't yet developed their style and their writer's persona and are easily pushed off the course.

Yuriy Tarnawsky

#96. Developing your voice takes ...
time and practice.

Darynda Jones

#97. At some point, I had to make a decision: I could practice more and become a really great guitar player or I could work on writing better songs. There are only so many hours in the day, and I found writing songs more fulfilling than working on becoming this virtuoso guitar player.

James Iha

#98. It takes a lot of practices to get it right. The key is to keep practicing.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#99. For me, practice isn't doing scales but doing things like writing, jamming with other people, or playing gigs.

Tommy Bolin

#100. Writing talent is similar to the art of chatting up a girl. You can improve to a certain degree through practice, but basically you are either born with it or you aren't.

Haruki Murakami