The Business Of Writing Quotes

#1. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.

Salman Rushdie

#2. There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

Paul Muldoon

#3. The business of writing is empathising with situations that aren't your own.

Richard North Patterson

#4. In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

Joseph Brodsky

#5. The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

Lisa Unger

#6. The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

Ethel Wilson

#7. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.

J.K. Rowling

#8. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

Martin Sorrell

#9. Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.

Chang-rae Lee

#10. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

Daniel J. Levitin

#11. I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!

Edan Lepucki

#12. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.

Jane Austen

#13. 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

#14. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

#15. If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics ... but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

Philip Pullman

#16. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.

Ted Allen

#17. If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

James M. Cain

#18. I love getting out the house because writing is such a solitary business that even being at the library makes me feel part of the world.

Jane Green

#19. If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.

S.J Perelman

#20. I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.

Butch Hancock

#21. Our business is communication oftentimes through the medium of stories but our capacity has a far greater scope - to entertain certainly, but also to stimulate debate, to mark up changes and differences and that way, to maybe, just now and then, to change the world.

Sara Sheridan

#22. I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking.

Kerry Washington

#23. It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.

Rod Serling

#24. If you get bored with nothing to do, you are not a writer ... We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.

Guillermo Del Toro

#25. I love what I do. I made my first record in '57. I don't think I'll ever get tired of making records and writing songs and singing and being in the music business.

Ray Stevens

#26. The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.

Keith Miller

#27. Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

Sidney Lanier

#28. Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.

Sarah Kay

#29. 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

#30. I do not put myself in a box and say, for instance, I'm writing post-colonial literature. I don't know what I'm writing. That's the business of professors and critics. My job is to tell a story, and that's it.

Isabel Allende

#31. Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

Joan Didion

#32. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#33. I think the business of music has really taken a huge hit. There's no doubt about it. But an artist is always going to produce their art, their music. They're going to paint, they're going to write.

Gloria Estefan

#34. Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly.

David Lagercrantz

#35. If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.

A. M. Rosenthal

#36. To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

Lillian Cauldwell

#37. Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.

Robert Galbraith

#38. It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle.

Christine Lavin

#39. The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid. Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn't mean, because they might be criticized for it.

Seth Godin

#40. Yeah, man I am going to be writing a book soon. The reality of being in a rock band in the music business'.

Steve Brown

#41. I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#42. If you've got craft, you got game. If you got game, you can write your way in and out of anything. Writing is the best gig in the whole business, as far as I'm concerned. It's the only job where you don't have to wait for someone to tell you what to do. You just sit down and make s**t up.

Robert Mark Kamen

#43. Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.

Gabrielle Zevin

#44. A person who doesn't have a structured way of writing their goals will experience disorder, even in the comfort zone.

Onyi Anyado

#45. Words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Frederick Buechner

#46. 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

#47. Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

Neil Cross

#48. I don't know if I have good habits, but I'm very devoted to writing. I'm very compulsive about having a project, at least one, and trying to follow the business as much as I can. I keep on top of all the entertainment business news.

Robert Lopez

#49. I like every part [of the film process ] except the business and admin stuff. The initial idea. Writing. Re-writing. Casting. Directing, Editing. If I had to chose I'd say writing, followed by putting music on the picture. That is magical.

Ricky Gervais

#50. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.

David Knopfler

#51. Somebody's always getting me to come lecture to their writing class, and I don't talk about writing at all, I talk about the business of making a living at this racket.

Jerry Pournelle

#52. The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

John Steinbeck

#53. One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.

Charlie Munger

#54. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.

Janet Evanovich

#55. All these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust

Nathanael West

#56. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

William Carlos Williams

#57. To become better writers we must become the best thieves and liars in the business. We slink around the pages of everyone else's work and shove it into our pockets. Then we run home and try to make it our own.

Christopher Stocking

#58. The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.

H.L. Mencken

#59. Some people have a lot of time, but no money--
It's because they don't work hard enough.
Some people have a lot of money, but no time--
It's because they don't work smart enough.
The most successful people have both.

Bob Sharpe

#60. Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.

Nancy Horan

#61. Now the writer, I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of ... reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us.

Virginia Woolf

#62. What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

Philip Roth

#63. Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.

Arthur Phillips

#64. The publishers, as I remember at the very beginning of my career, wrote letters with their fountain pens. A letter is different from a phone call or fax. It's a different kind of intimacy. That pervaded the entire business of writing and publishing.

James Salter

#65. If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

David Ogilvy

#66. I gave up lots of things I love doing: writing, and business, and playing the piano and so on.

William Hague

#67. I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

Marc Maron

#68. Writing is a long and lonesome business; back of the problems in thought and composition hover always the awful questions: Is this the page that shows the empty shell? Is it here and now that they find me out?

John Kenneth Galbraith

#69. In the business world, I did fairly well, but wasn't happy. A bout of sciatica put me flat on my back. All I could do was read, listen to my mother's stories about the Sandovals, and daydream: a return to self. My writing career had begun.

Sandra Cisneros

#70. As I quietly stare off into space, eyes glazed over and brow thoughtfully taut, know that I am going about my business. I am a storyteller. Daydreaming is the best part of my job.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#71. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.

E.B. White

#72. The White House again refused to turn over discussions Vice President Cheney had with Enron officials over energy policy. Cheney said if he had to disclose every time some business donated a ton of money then came in to write its own policy to govern itself, he wouldn't get any work done.

Dennis Miller

#73. We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

Fred Frith

#74. I don't think that writing talent has much to do with where one went to school, or the number of degrees on one's business card, but I do get a bit bristly at the implication that romance authors couldn't possibly be smart enough to get into an Ivy League school.

Julia Quinn

#75. To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

Samuel Johnson

#76. I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it's none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can't wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

#77. Don't always be appraising yourself, wondering if you are better or worse than other writers. "I will not Reason and Compare," said Blake; "my business is to Create." Besides, since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of Time, you are incomparable.

Brenda Ueland

#78. I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?

Wilkie Collins

#79. Success is the delivery of a product that meets expectation

James Leal

#80. It is not democracy to send in billions of dollars to push regime change overseas. It isn't democracy to send in the NGOs to re-write laws and the constitution in places like Ukraine. It is none of our business.

Ron Paul

#81. That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.

Jackson Browne

#82. Mike Ruby, a writer in the magazine's Business section, used to call Newsweek writing f - k-style journalism: Flash (the lead), Understanding (the billboard - why is this story important), Clarification (tell the details of the story), and Kicker (bringing it all together with a clever ending).

Lynn Povich

#83. Writing is a tough business, but never forget the reason why you write. It's for the love of story telling. Fame and fortune may elude you, but that's no reason to give up. Remember, there's always someone ready to listen to a good story.

Robert Bartram

#84. Writing can be a lonely business. But gradually your characters, or the scenes and peopl from your past, begin to rise up around you, and you find yourself writing your way out of loneliness, writing into your own company.

Barbara Abercrombie

#85. Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle.

Ashwin Sanghi

#86. When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Elena Ferrante

#87. Out of silence I begin to hear the voices of characters whispering snippets of a story to me.

Chuck Waldron

#88. Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you.

Scott Westerfeld

#89. Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.

Walter Russell

#90. When I started writing a business column 15 years ago, I knew I'd found the perfect job for myself. As a columnist I could pick my own topic, do my own analysis, say what I wanted to say and attribute it to myself. Best of all, I could write in my own voice.

Allan Sloan

#91. Keep things informal. Talking is the natural way to do business. Writing is great for keeping records and putting down details, but talk generates ideas. Great things come from out luncheon meetings which consist of a sandwich, a cup of soup, and a good idea or two. No martinis.

T. Boone Pickens

#92. There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.

Russell Baker

#93. In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality.

Tom Peters

#94. The business of the novelist is not to relate great events, but to make small ones interesting.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#95. He (Mario Vargas Llosa) looks grave, transported. And there, I think, is the personality that wrote the books: one in which a subversive comic sense and appetite for the ridiculous jostle with an intense, statesmanlike seriousness about the business of being alive.

Tim Martin

#96. Writing is a lonely business, which if allowed publicity and socializing it might deteriorate. Supportive people understand the need of a writer to withdraw to the solitude of oneself.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

#97. Google AdWords help with targeting people. Social media makes it easy to find people. A lot of people write blogs as a hobby. Others do it to make money. Instead of advertising on a blog, do a revenue share where you give them a 10-percent share for the business you receive.

Cameron Johnson

#98. Till the time I found a creative outlet, I was trying to be extra creative at business, which would always put me in a situation of conflict with other stakeholders. The moment I started writing, my creative impulses were finally channelised.

Ashwin Sanghi

#99. The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

H.L. Mencken

#100. People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads that one mustn't write save at I the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business.

George Gissing