Quotes About Writing Voice

#1. My writing voice is a little quirkier, more singer-songwriter-y than the Top 40 stuff I cover.

Sam Tsui

#2. Writing voice isn't as much a function of thinking as it is something that eludes definition and therefore assimilation. The more artful flavors of prose are more often a function of intuition and imitation fused with heart and wit and delivered with a strong does of lyric sensibility. It

Larry Brooks

#3. Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.

Meg Rosoff

#4. Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.

Naveed Saleh

#5. My writing voice is very much like 'Thank You for Smoking.' It's a guy's voice. It's very masculine.

Jason Reitman

#6. When you write, it's just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with - though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It's the poetry part of you.

Douglas Coupland

#7. Don't imitate. Find your own writing voice and hone it until it is yours alone.

Christopher Holliday

#8. A pen transmits the voice of the soul.

Fennel Hudson

#9. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.

Katherine Center

#10. It takes great courage to write great books. Find your courage and find your voice.

Kristen Lamb

#11. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.

Roger Ebert

#12. He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.

Victor Serge

#13. 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

#14. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.

Kerry Washington

#15. Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

Adam Ross

#16. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Joyce Carol Oates

#17. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.

James Frey

#18. One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

Quentin Tarantino

#19. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.

Mordecai Richler

#20. One exercise I always do when I'm getting to know a character is ask her to tell me her secrets. Sit down with a pen and paper, and start with, 'I never told anybody ... ' and go from there, writing in the voice of your character.

Jennifer McMahon

#21. What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter's evening.

Truman Capote

#22. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.

Victor LaValle

#23. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

David Byrne

#24. Writing for 'Rooster' was a strange experience. It's funny, once you tap into a voice, words just start to flow. You know when you've hit a spirit or captured something.

Jez Butterworth

#25. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

P.D. James

#26. Well, it's my voice, so it's more accessible that way, and there are also all sorts of things like plot and timelines that are already known entities, so for me, it's very different from writing fiction.

Alice Sebold

#27. When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive.

Hisham Matar

#28. ...teaching is like playing jazz. Even if you perform the same number over and over, it never comes out the same twice, and you don't know exactly how it will sound until you hear it. Teaching is like writing with your voice

Earl R. Babbie

#29. In nearly everything I write, I am like a ventriloquist, throwing my voice into my characters, animating them by the slightest twitch as I register my anxieties and alarms. This is true even in my comedies.

Norman Lock

#30. Writing is the voice of the heart' Julia Suzuki

Julia Suzuki

#31. When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets ... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

Jack Prelutsky

#32. I try to transmit emotion and soul in my voice, but my true passion has always been writing. I feel more like a writer than anything else.

Romeo Santos

#33. I am often asked what I would be doing if I hadn't become a writer. I have long said I would probably be a chef or a garden designer or a decorator, but since recording my own books, there is no doubt in my mind that if the writing doesn't work out, voice work is what I would choose.

Jane Green

#34. It felt good to be writing in her own room, in her own bed. To get lost in the World of Mages and stay lost. To not hear any voices in her head but Simon's and Baz's. Not even her own. This was why Cath wrote fic. For these hours when their world supplanted the real world.

Rainbow Rowell

#35. Although my other ambition was to be a musical theater star (and I would attend college on a voice scholarship), writing was never far from my mind.

Alex Flinn

#36. I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

Armando Iannucci

#37. I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published ... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

Markus Zusak

#38. Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.

Steve Earle

#39. Thich Nhat Hanh writes with the voice of the Buddha.

Sogyal Rinpoche

#40. The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

Harold Holzer

#41. I am in no way a confident person - except when it comes to what I'm writing. It's just like, this is what I can do, and I have what I think is a pretty strong voice, for better or worse. It's the style I like to write in.

Megan Amram

#42. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

Margaret Atwood

#43. Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

Roland Barthes

#44. I have to resort to email, and email is not enough. I am starting to get tired of relying on words. They are full of meaning, yes, but they lack sensation. Writing to her is not the same as seeing her face as she listens. Hearing back from her is not the same as hearing her voice.

David Levithan

#45. Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read.

David Starkey

#46. Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.
And I had to call him Maxim.

Daphne Du Maurier

#47. Don't write what you think people want to read. Find your voice and write about what's in your heart.

Quentin Tarantino

#48. We write because something inside says we must and we can no longer ignore that voice.

Sheila Bender

#49. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera

#50. The mind working alone produces thought; the heart produces feeling; the tongue makes speech and the hand in isolation makes scribble: all four together create voice.

Geoff Hewitt

#51. Writers searching for their voice: Whatever you're afraid to say, whatever burns inside you, say it with conviction. You don't need a class for that.

Gregor Collins

#52. The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.

Khaled Hosseini

#53. Bells ringing with no sound
Laughter with no voice
Happiness lost without being found
Making love with no noise

T. Grassan

#54. Speech is the body part of thinking, the voice of the mind. Writing is the blood and mind mixing to speak through the fingers, through the hands.

Lenora Champagne

#55. If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message.

Fennel Hudson

#56. When I write, I try to represent the voices of people I've known who had no voice.

Carla H. Krueger

#57. Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? ... That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.

Philip Gerard

#58. You meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you've been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: 'Write this down'

Carlos Santana

#59. I have a voice that's obviously untrained - and I think untrainable - so I kind of secreted it away for a long time. Actually, I would write songs with lyrics when I was younger, but I would just sing in my head.

Joanna Newsom

#60. The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink.

Rachel L. Schade

#61. I miss everything. I miss talking to her, hearing about her day. I miss her voice all gravelly and smoky, I miss hearing her laugh, I miss getting her letters, writing her letters. I miss her eyes, and the smell of her hair, and the way her breath tasted. I fucking miss everything.

James Frey

#62. . . .poetry by Eliot. There's a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.

Louisa Hall

#63. People say I write specifically about nothing in particular. I don't know about the latter part, but I think the first part is really important in conjuring up a voice that works, or at least the illusion of a voice at work.

Dan Bejar

#64. Writing in the voice of an American slave felt like I was biting off something very large.

Sue Monk Kidd

#65. What's fun about the story development at Pixar is it's a journey. You don't just write a script and then that's the movie you make. It's just constant evolution and being open to that and that collaboration with the voice actors and with the artists and animators at Pixar.

John Lasseter

#66. The habit of prayer communicates a penetrating sweetness to the glance, the voice, the smile, the tears,
to all one says, or does, or writes.

Philibert Joseph Roux

#67. What we call the freedom of the individual is not just the luxury of one intellectual to write what he likes to write but his being a voice which can speak for those who are silent.

Stephen Spender

#68. By the time I was six or seven-years-old, I had learned several techniques of how to use my voice and was able to choose the sound I wanted to distinguish myself, so I started writing songs on the piano.

Wendy Starland

#69. When you're writing there's a deep, deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you.

John Banville

#70. Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social?

Michelle M. Pillow

#71. There are some different things I'm writing and developing, but I don't know where they'll go. They're fun stuff that I would be in and are written in my voice, for me.

Abby Elliott

#72. The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides ... It's the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you're writing, because the teacher won't like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

Seth Godin

#73. My goal in writing for teens and tweens is to help my audience feel inspired and empowered today, to find their voice today, to believe that they can truly design the life of their dreams ... today. I mean seriously ... why wait?

Deborah Reber

#74. I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

J. A. Jance

#75. I can write for any magazine now, in any voice. I can do it in two hours, I could do it in my sleep, it's like writing a grocery list.

Ann Patchett

#76. Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

John Updike

#77. It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.

John Wick

#78. I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun.

Rosanne Cash

#79. I don't particularly enjoy standing alone and recording my own voice or my own stuff. It's sometimes fun to do for demos and stuff, but I really enjoy the social act of recording records, because writing it is so lonely. And it has to be.

Sondre Lerche

#80. I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don't really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.

Gillian Welch

#81. I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.

Angelina Jolie

#82. I studied piano and viola and voice in high school and music composition in college. For many years before I became an author I was a singer songwriter, writing for Disney and Sesame Street. I believe in perfect rhymes - no cheating!

Sarah Weeks

#83. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

Terry Tempest Williams

#84. Stop looking for that person you were in the past. She has changed. Look for the person she has grown into. She is wiser and stronger than than ever before. Don't go back to who you were. Cherish who you are." --Without a Voice by Chris Pepple

Chris Pepple

#85. When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.

Dana Spiotta

#86. Having an attack of self-doubt about your writing ability?

Step #1 - Tell yourself - 'I'm the best damn writer there is, and the world deserves to hear my voice.'

Step #2 - Repeat Step #1 until you believe it.

Jonathan Maas

#87. Voice is really about letting your characters loose.

C.S. Lakin

#88. When you're writing fiction it's a heightened voice. You're trying to cast a spell, which isn't the same thing as trying to cast someone into it. You are creating a reality but it's a different sort of performance.

Darryl Pinckney

#89. I sing the best when I'm really in my voice. It's kind of like I'm meditating but I sort of imagine my voice as a physical thing. I see colours, I feel it moving out of me and I try to tap into images that I was tapping into when I was writing the song.

Brett Dennen

#90. The major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could no longer be heard on radio or television.

Galina Vishnevskaya

#91. You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Laurie Halse Anderson

#92. It's pretty interesting how it all started out. After The Voice, I got introduced to some of my publishing people. We were out in Los Angeles and they said to give them a call when the show was all said and done and they'd get me into the writing world.

Curtis Grimes

#93. Write relentlessly, until you find your voice. Then, use it.

David Sedaris

#94. I have been taking voice and singing lessons since age 10 and originally got into it because I was really interested in musical theater. After writing my first couple of songs and performing at age 14, I knew that I really wanted to be a singer.

Daya

#95. If I'm writing about my life, I'm already thinking of anyone in my life who might be reading it, and I'm keeping that as a kind of censorship voice in my head. And then, commenters - I'm keeping that in my head, too.

Mandy Stadtmiller

#96. I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.

Mike O'Brien

#97. The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

Will Leitch

#98. Sometimes things you write are messages to yourself. Even though I think my stuff has a particular voice because you are who you are, it's good to switch it up, professionally and personally. The dare to be great situation is always going to be the one that matters the most.

Cameron Crowe

#99. You can't predict the number of years it will take for someone to find themselves, to mature into their own voice. When I got to be 30, I was finally writing like Danny Brown.

Danny Brown

#100. To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

Deborah Levy