Top 100 Re Writing Quotes
#1. The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.
Carl Hiaasen
#2. You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay.
Nora Ephron
#3. You're writing it is how you feel. And when you're finished you put your signature on it and you mail it off and that's it. And that's how "Stand By Me" was really.
Ben E. King
#4. There's a whole gamut of things to do with film music that don't apply when you're making a record or if you're writing a concert piece or something.
Henry Jackman
#5. I'm still very much a believer in the spontaneity of certain kinds of writing. But then you have to eventually, when you're writing a long play, make adjustments along the way - all kinds of adjustments.
Sam Shepard
#6. They may recognize themselves in what you're writing, and then they have to say, "Well, she doesn't see me as I see myself." All a writer has is her own experience, and that experience comes out of human relationships.
Vivian Gornick
#7. Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.
Lauren Oliver
#8. I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.
Jami Attenberg
#9. I think, as journalists, we sometimes are afraid to enter into the emotional lives and the complications of the lives of the people we write about - we don't really have the space and the room to deal with those things. But as a novelist, that's precisely what you're writing about.
Hector Tobar
#10. I think either you're creative or you're not. In general, I don't think you need to be in pain to actually be creative unless you're writing love songs. Then you might need to have some ups and downs within your emotions to start to capture that.
Curtis Jackson
#11. There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
Beck
#12. We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.
Matt Groening
#13. You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
Ernest Hemingway,
#14. When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.
Leo Ornstein
#15. There's something about these moments when we're writing music that I absolutely love. All my worries and thoughts about everything wrong in my life seem to go away for the short times we write together. It's nice.
Anonymous
#16. When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
Claudia Rankine
#17. Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.
Patti Digh
#18. You get so caught up in what you're writing - action sequences tend to do that more than anything else because you're living it, and feeling for your characters.
Iain Banks
#19. Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song.
Luke Hemmings
#20. I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.
Caleb Carr
#21. All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.
Joe Haldeman
#22. When you're writing, it's all up to you, and you don't have to make any compromises. And when you're directing, there's this intense pleasure you get from working with all these really talented people, and pooling the efforts towards a common goal. I like all the aspects of film-making.
Henry Selick
#23. Please think about your legacy, because you're writing it every day.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#24. When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.
Albert Hammond Jr.
#25. When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.
Lady Gaga
#26. I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.
Helen Fielding
#27. I think in most cases, unless you're writing about a character who is garrulous, you say what you've got to say and then get out. Those little conjunctions, those little turnaround words help you do it. That's the way I like to write: I get rid of things rather than add them.
Randy Newman
#28. The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.
Harlan Ellison
#29. When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
James A. Baldwin
#30. Directing is a more pragmatic experience, where you have to deal with the restrictions of time and money that force you to make certain decisions you don't have to make when you're writing.
Charlie Kaufman
#31. It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam.
G. Willow Wilson
#32. Anyway, the way political history is passed down is influenced and spoiled by the closeness of the writers to the political figures that they're writing about. It's a sad state of affairs, but there's probably more veracity of reporting in my work than there is in the newspapers.
Raymond Pettibon
#33. You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.
Anna Quindlen
#34. When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.
Chuck Klosterman
#35. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.
Georgia Heard
#36. It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
Michael Ondaatje
#37. I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.
Erica Jong
#38. I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age ... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.
Gerry Beckley
#39. It can get a little costly if you try and leave it until then to write songs. But you're writing all the time. You're collecting songs. I've had songs that have been collected over a two-year period for my next record.
Keith Urban
#40. The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.
James Thurber
#41. When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone ... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.
Felix Dennis
#42. I think when you're writing songs, it's impossible to not draw on personal experiences, whether it be traveling or girls or anything. Just emotions.
Harry Styles
#43. It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.
Leigh Newman
#44. Even if it's a definition that feels oppressive to us, that oppression can be inspiring because it helps us push up against something while we're writing. Or if it's a definition that we want to defend and uphold, we are given a sense of the boundaries within which we can work.
John D'Agata
#45. Whenever you're making a movie, especially when you're writing, you always have self-doubts.
George Lucas
#46. When you're writing, you're making decisions about compression and the shape of a life, which are very similar to how we experience our inner consciousness.
Rachel Holmes
#47. It's much easier to teach writing, because people are less shy about writing. If they're in a group, nobody can see what they're writing. When you're drawing, people get a little more nervous.
Lynda Barry
#48. The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.
Abi Morgan
#49. Never tell anyone that you're writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death.
Lynn Johnston
#50. When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.
J. Michael Straczynski
#51. You could be anybody when you're writing. That's the reason that I'm writing: to be anybody. You can put your feet in various shoes and experience anything.
Haruki Murakami
#52. When you write the script, you're home in a room by yourself, and you're writing, and there's no connection with the real performing world. So you get a lot of things wrong and make a lot of mistakes and make a lot of bad choices.
Woody Allen
#53. People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
Jamaica Kincaid
#54. And I know about psychologists, when they're writing down what you're saying they're really writing down how much money they're going to get when they sell their latest yacht, because they're all yuppies with no respect. ...
Ned Vizzini
#55. When you're writing first person, all I can see and tell as the author is what that main character can see.
Pearl Cleage
#56. The important thing is not to be too comfortable when you're writing. Noise in the street? That's good. The computer goes down? That's good. All these things are good. It has to be a little bit of a struggle.
E.L. Doctorow
#57. You should always have 2 books ... the one you're reading and the one you're writing.
Sterling W. Sill
#58. When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others.
Rob Lowe
#59. The desk thing is a problem for me. The ideal one would be vast and perfectly clear. Yet the bane of the biographical existence is paper; if you're 'an artist under oath' you're writing from a mountain of documentation.
Stacy Schiff
#60. If you're writing fantasy or science fiction, it's really hard to do if you don't know a lot, at least in a basic way, about how the real world works.
Tad Williams
#61. You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.
Rebecca Sugar
#62. If you're writing a story and YOU can't wait to see how it all pans out, then you are doing something right.
Giuseppe Bianco
#63. When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
Michael Ondaatje
#64. No. Seriously. Speak American and not this ancient and very fucked-up, confusing olden-day Euro crap. Without the confusing woo-woo refrences, explain why the hell you're writing Zoey off.
P.C. Cast
#65. There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.
Hanya Yanagihara
#66. I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.
David Chase
#67. The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
Lou Doillon
#68. When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.
Elliott Colla
#69. In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.
Marsha Norman
#70. The rules are all in a sixty-four-page pamphlet by Aristotle called 'Poetics.' It was written almost three thousand years ago, but I promise you, if something is wrong with what you're writing, you've probably broken one of Aristotle's rules.
Aaron Sorkin
#71. I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.
Adam Schlesinger
#72. I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing.
Patti Smith
#73. I really like writing for specific projects. It's a whole different way of writing when you have certain guidelines and a theme you're writing to. It's very inspiring.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#74. To me, truth is the big thing. Constantly you're writing something and you get to a place where your characters could go this way or that and I just can't lie. The characters have gotta be true to themselves.
Quentin Tarantino
#75. I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.
Ignazio Silone
#76. I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.
Lawrence Weschler
#77. If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.
Shannon L. Alder
#78. Popular music usually has a chorus that needs to repeat, and people need to remember the song. That's sort of the major guideline when you're writing a song.
Alex Ebert
#79. If you're writing a screenplay from scratch, it involves a lot of creation.
Philippe Falardeau
#80. If somebody comes up to me, it's because they're moved by something I'm moved by. I've never taken a job I didn't love ... So when somebody's coming up to me, or they're writing, they're in the same space I am in.
Joss Whedon
#81. I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.
Martin McDonagh
#82. One of the most necessary things when you're writing? The waste basket.
Enkelejd Lamaj
#83. To me, writing is fun. It doesn't matter what you're writing, as long as you can tell a story.
Stan Lee
#84. I try to write songs just for the song itself. I don't try and think about where it's going to end up, that way you're writing for the good of the song.
Jon Foreman
#85. Does it help?" he asks. "The e-mailing."
She nods. "A tiny bit. It's strange. You're writing a letter to someone who's never going to read it, so it kind of frees you up a bit.
Melina Marchetta
#86. When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
E.L. Doctorow
#87. Don't hold back and save stuff for the next book. Put everything you have into the one you're writing, - Michael Connelly
Sue Ward Drake
#88. The only way you can acquire anything is by writing a cheque. At the end of the day you're writing a personal cheque, which tends to concentrate the mind.
Martin Naughton
#89. The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.
Aleksandar Hemon
#90. The problem with dragons is that everyone uses them. All the time. When that happens, they become commonplace. A lot of people think you can just throw them into a story and suddenly whatever you're writing is 28% cooler. But that doesn't work. All that does is make dragons into some boring cliche.
Patrick Rothfuss
#91. There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.
Andy Weir
#92. When you're writing a sketch, it has to be surrounded by a situation. It can't just be out of the air.
Leslie Jones
#93. I've been acting for so long it's more like - I won't say easy, exactly, but there's not the same angst with writing that comes about with acting. Writing - particularly when you're writing yourself, when it's you, when it's your life, you really can't hide.
Molly Ringwald
#94. Doing something that you love regardless when it's a blockbuster movie or you're writing a pop song or trying shamelessly to succeed in something is not selling out. I think that's actually fine, and I would encourage that all the time.
Adam Levine
#95. If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.
Alex Chilton
#97. Writing is always a restorative process. It's like paddling a kayak. When you're writing, you can't do anything else. You're in the space you're in. So, in that way, it's enormously centering and restorative.
Tabitha King
#98. You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#99. I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
Rick Riordan
#100. In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.
Leni Zumas
