Top 100 Quotes About Writing Well
#1. I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
Edward Abbey
#2. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#3. I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.
Bauvard
#4. The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.
Dan Chaon
#5. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
Caroline Kennedy
#6. I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.
David Bergen
#7. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
#8. If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - Well, I'm going to write about a thing.
Charlie Daniels
#9. If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.
Anne Stuart
#10. Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.
Colbie Caillat
#11. I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.
James Lipton
#13. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.
Joan Didion
#14. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.
Steve Coogan
#15. In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.
Brian P. Cleary
#16. Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
Lisel Mueller
#17. Dude, writing, acting and directing are such easy jobs. But to do them all as awesomely as Zach Braff does, well that ... that's something.
Zach Braff
#18. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#19. Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.
Ted Rall
#20. As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.
James Luceno
#21. I was a Navy officer writing about Navy problems and I simply stole this lovely Army nurse and popped her into a Navy uniform, where she has done very well for herself.
James A. Michener
#22. 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
#23. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
Kevin Spacey
#24. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#25. You can't teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#26. Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
#27. My wife and I always comment that our lives are relatively mundane. She's a writer as well, I'm a writer, we spend most of our time writing, and kind of going to yoga in Brooklyn.
Mike Birbiglia
#28. I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.
Robert B. Parker
#29. 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
#30. Well, I hear things," she began. "And ... well, writing things down? I suppose that's a suitable job for a lady, isn't it? It's practically cultural.
Terry Pratchett
#31. Well, when you write about people of a certain age ... we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.
Edward Albee
#32. All writing is ultimately a question of solving a problem.
William Zinsser
#33. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#34. 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
#35. If you want to be a singer, you've got to concentrate on it twenty-four hours a day. You can't be a well driller, too. 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.
Otis Redding
#36. Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Write your own music and write frequently. Go to as many live shows as you can as well (of bands you enjoy of course). You can learn a lot watching other performers.
Dia Frampton
#38. If the character is really well-rounded, and it's a really strong character, and if the writing is just fantastic, that's the thing that will hook me in, certainly.
Amanda Abbington
#39. My hands are already full writing and directing, because that's a full time job. Actually, that's why I don't produce as well, as there's already enough producers.
David Twohy
#40. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
#41. Never pump the well dry; always leave a bucket there.
Truman Capote
#42. Well I've been locking myself up in my house for some time now Reading and writing and reading and thinking and searching for reasons and missing the seasons The Autumn, the Spring, the Summer, the snow
Colleen Hoover
#43. I really, truly believe that writing comes out of the body; of course, the mind is working as well, but it's a double thing and that doubleness is united. I mean, you can't separate persona from psyche; you just can't do it.
Paul Auster
#44. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#45. You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St. Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting.
Kelly Link
#46. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
Gilbert Sorrentino
#47. Write what's in you. Write readily and well. Then edit. Then share or send. Not before.
Rodney Richards
#48. As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
Joan D. Vinge
#49. If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.
Kurt Vonnegut
#50. ...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.
William Zinsser
#51. I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
James Surowiecki
#52. A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.
Steve Lacy
#53. I just want to touch something deep in the heart of humanity. I don't know if that's in movies, producing films, or writing a book, but I'm concerned about our spiritual well-being as a human race. I want to impact people in a way that makes us all reach for our best.
Nicole Ari Parker
#54. It's not so much that I write well, I just don't write badly very often and that passes for good on television.
Andy Rooney
#55. For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.
Stephen King
#56. You may well ask me why ... I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
George Bernard Shaw
#57. I'm very keen. Adaptations of other people's work, too. I got fascinated by the adaptation process, so I think that'd be a really interesting task. I would happily write original screenplays as well. I think it's become one of my favorite genres.
Emma Donoghue
#58. Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?
S.A. Tawks
#59. If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.
Richard Lewontin
#60. Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.
Guy Debord
#61. 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
#62. A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison.
Louis Auchincloss
#63. Anybody can write a book. But writing it well and making it sell - that's the hard part.
Jay Taylor
#64. I know as well as thee that I am no poet born
It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn
If I make verses-'tis in spite
Of nature and my stars I write.
Benjamin Franklin
#65. When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.
Kelly Link
#66. I had been learning Italian for years. I always loved Latin, but Italian is a living language; I'm writing in it now as well as reading it. It is so interesting delving further into language.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#67. A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'
Dennis Christopher
#68. 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
#69. I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was number one on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
Jacqueline Briskin
#70. Sometimes what I'm writing is more important to me than the rest of my life. It's more important to me that I'm writing well than anything else.
Randy Newman
#71. Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing.
Val Guest
#72. Well I mean I just sit at the piano and maybe figure out some harmony or melody or both. Sometimes you can hear it in your head. Sometimes you don't always have to write it down. You just write it down so you can remember it.
Roy Hargrove
#73. Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
Julia Cameron
#74. I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.
Mark Millar
#75. Longhand isn't well suited to my way of writing. I tend to end up with dozens of pages of crossings-out and margin scribbles just to find one good paragraph, and it's easy to lose your train of thought, working like that.
Steven Hall
#76. I'd like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing.
Stephen King
#77. Those who write against vanity want the glory of having written well, and their readers the glory of reading well, and I who write this have the same desire, as perhaps those who read this have also.
Blaise Pascal
#78. Writing is a kind of performing art, and I can't sit down to write unless I'm dressed. I don't mean dressed in a suit, but dressed well and comfortably and I have to be shaved and bathed.
Peter O'Toole
#79. ... Writing is something that you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done - so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well.
Ernest Hemingway,
#80. My writing arises out of erotic impulse toward an other: it is an act of love. And I want terribly to be loved in return, as a sign that I have loved well enough.
Nancy Mairs
#81. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
Frank Herbert
#82. For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well.
Gene C. Fant Jr.
#83. In our age, when technology is gaining control over life, when material well-being is considered the most important goal, when the influence of religion has been weakened everywhere in the world, a special responsibility lies upon the writer.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#84. I had decided to be a magician well before I decided to be a writer. I was the little boy who would get up on-stage and do magic wearing a fake mustache, which would fall off during the performance. I'm still trying to perform those tricks. Now I do it with writing.
Ray Bradbury
#85. Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.
Anita Shreve
#86. No good writing flows from a polluted well - you can write about monsters, but you can't be one ...
John Geddes
#87. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#88. From those who agonize that they may no longer be able to write off their private jet to someone who doesn't feel like making the three mile hike to the well to get water and carry it back, everyone struggles.
Henry Rollins
#89. Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.
John Sandford
#90. When I was growing up, my parents asked me what I wanted to do, and I said that I wanted to live in Springfield. They were like, "Well, that's not how it works. There is an actor who play Homer, and someone who writes what Homer says." So, I was like, "Well, I want to write what Homer says."
Jonah Hill
#91. He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
John Milton
#92. To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.
Aristotle.
#93. Whoever you are, you've got to start from where you are. If you're a sailor, and only know sailor's language, well, write in it, for God's sake.
Peter Levi
#94. I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at.
John Grisham
#95. Editors, for the most part, don't care 'what' you've done, or how astounding the physical event may have been. You need to write well. Many others are capable of doing what you have done (probably), so you must write better than they ...
Tim Cahill
#96. Well, Bud," he said, looking at me, "I'll be damned if you don't go to a lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you do on your holidays? Burn houses?
William Faulkner
#97. The power of fictitious writing, for good as well as for evil, is a thing which ought most seriously to be reflected upon.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#98. Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.
Kristan Higgins
#99. We didn't want to worry about the formula that has been implanted into our brains - this verse/pre-chorus/chorus format. When we were writing 'The Papercut Chronicles,' we had no idea about any of that. We didn't know how to count bars or how to write what's considered a well-formatted pop song.
Travie McCoy
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