Top 100 The Real Writing Quotes
#1. Not writing the same kind of book over and over again is to me the real pleasure of what I do.
Bill Bryson
#2. Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
Anthony Marra
#3. Texting is a sex toy: pleasurable but a substitute for the real thing. Love has a face. Video chatting is good, but who's comfortable enough to share their "bed hair"? Love isn't about pat answers.
Chila Woychik
#4. I think I've been very lucky. The readers who write to me say they like the characters and the sense of a real world, often one they don't otherwise know about. And usually there's a funny bit in there somewhere.
Sophie Weston
#5. The principal lesson of Emacs is that a language for extensions should not be a mere "extension language". It should be a real programming language, designed for writing and maintaining substantial programs. Because people will want to do that!
Richard Stallman
#6. You do not just get to know what you did not know when you travel to the right scenery, but you get to know the real reasons behind what you did not know when you go on an expedition!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#7. My natural tendency is to write about zombie bunnies, but one of my first writing teachers got incorporated into my writing superego, and I keep hearing his admonition to make things feel more real the weirder they get.
Chris Adrian
#8. I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about. I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying. Beginning was awful.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#9. The difference between real life and a story is that life has significance, while a story must have meaning.
The former is not always apparent, while the latter always has to be, before the end.
Vera Nazarian
#10. When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.
Tayari Jones
#11. A typical day in my writing life starts with looking at pictures of real estate online for at least 20 minutes. If I happen to be actually in the market for a house, I do this for 40 minutes. Then I walk my dog, come back home, and tell myself I can look at real estate for another five minutes.
Meghan Daum
#12. As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it's not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea.
Shawn Anthony Levy
#13. Letters are the real curse of my existence. I hate to write them: I have to. If I don't, there they are - the great guilty gates barring my way.
Katherine Mansfield
#14. Good fiction is trawling back into the past and digging up the real characters who've influenced your entire being.
Ken Scott
#15. 'Police Story' had some of the best writing on television, and one reason for that is because most of the scripts were based on real cases.
Michael Mann
#16. 'Skins' is about a group of teenagers in Bristol, and it's all about what they get up to and all the different things they do. I think it's a good show because it's come from a very real place, and there's a lot of young people involved in the writing.
Hannah Murray
#17. I think when you're 17 and you're angry, you're angry about very short-term things. And there's nothing wrong about writing that record. It's a very real record to write; it's the realest record I could write when I was 17. The problem is, when you're 28, it's not the same thing; it can be a put-on.
Patrick Stump
#18. A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.
Jhene Aiko
#19. For me, personally, the point of writing is to connect me to this world, to my fellow humans. We are all miles apart. We have no real means of connecting except via language. And the deepest form of language is storytelling.
Matt Haig
#20. I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real.
Zach Braff
#21. The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.
David Sedaris
#22. The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves.
Derrick Jensen
#23. New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.
Jen Pollock Michel
#24. I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.
Monica Ali
#25. 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
#26. When I'm writing a comic book, I'm thinking about a character that I'm going to be drawing on the page. I've never drawn a character to look like who I want to cast in a movie because I don't think that way. I'm a real monomaniac. I do one thing at a time.
Frank Miller
#27. When I'm writing, the romance is always the most important thing to me, but I really love adding in slices of real life, and for me that real life always includes animals.
Jill Shalvis
#28. Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.
Isaac Asimov
#29. I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.
Sara Sheridan
#30. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader.
Anne Lamott
#31. The trouble with real life is that you don't know whether you're the hero or just some nice chap who gets bumped off in chapter five to show what a rotter the villain is without anyone minding too much.
Sarah Caudwell
#32. Writing is like bungee jumping for the soul ... you take a deep breath, plunge into the abyss and hope the rope tethering you to the real world doesn't snap.
Judy Croome
#33. A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
Stephen King
#34. That's the difference between a real journal and one that's invented for a novel - a novel journal has to be manipulated so someone reading it can have enough comprehension, which means the person writing it would've had to have a sense of a someday-audience.
Cris Mazza
#35. The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.
Vince Gill
#36. One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.
Sara Sheridan
#37. And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
Sandra Cisneros
#38. Horror writers can write about everything in the real world that a mainstream novelist can
plus the supernatural, which is the most fertile field for metaphor imaginable.
Bentley Little
#39. You really don't understand the first thing about writing ... for one thing, early in the morning is the worst possible time. the brain is like a wet sponge at that hour. And for another, real writing is a question of staring into space and waiting for the right ideas.
Cornelia Funke
#40. I don't teach anymore, but I can still clearly see fifth period after lunch - that's a real tough time to teach. And I tried to imagine writing a story that would appeal to those kids - even when they're tired, even when they're bouncing off the walls.
Rick Riordan
#41. You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.
Kamal Ravikant
#42. It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past.
Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?
Margaret Atwood
#43. Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers.
Kelly Gallagher
#44. Working with the morning pages, we begin to sort through the differences between our real feelings, which are often secret, and our official feelings, those on the record for public display.
Julia Cameron
#45. There's no scientific definition. A hymn ... is a song of praise to God. I think there were three real goals with our hymns that made them seem more in line with traditional classical hymn writing than with the modern worship movement and differentiate us slightly.
Keith Getty
#46. The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me.
Gloria E. Anzaldua
#47. I don't *ever* write about real people. Art is supposed to be better than that. If you want a slice of life, look out the window.
Barbara Kingsolver
#49. It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world.
Haruki Murakami
#50. I usually end have one outrageous minor character. He or she says the stuff I wish I had said in real life. Readers will love that character.
Dan Alatorre
#51. 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
#52. Well, I believe that "thinking" is just as real a phenomenon in the world as anything else, and just as worthy of exploration. Maybe even more? So writing about "thought" to me is like writing about a tree or anything else real.
Matthew Zapruder
#53. You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.
Sara Sheridan
#54. A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard
by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
#55. The whole trick is to make it feel like you're spying on real people's lives as they get through the day. When I'm writing, I have to trick myself as a writer. If I consciously say, 'I'm writing,' I feel all this pressure and somehow it doesn't feel as real as when it doesn't seem to count as much.
David O. Russell
#56. All my friends and relatives have always taken a condescending tone to my writing, and never ceased urging me in a friendly way not to give up real work for the sake of scribbling.
Anton Chekhov
#57. When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.
Haruki Murakami
#58. I think the press does, too; it's just the few crazies and paparazzi that give them a bad name. Real writers write good things. My daughter's a writer, and she's a quality writer.
Debbie Reynolds
#59. Real life is - quieter, more understated. No one is backlot and nothing has a soundtrack and no one has someone cleverer than them writing their lines. And so they just say nothing and get on with it. More's the pity, if you ask me, I quite like the idea of my own soundtrack.
Matthew Crow
#60. Alongside my 'no email' policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
Tom Hodgkinson
#61. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
Billy Wilder
#62. In the shower, with the hot water coming down, you've left the real world behind, and very frequently things open up for you. It's the change of venue, the unblocking the attempt to force the ideas that's crippling you when you're trying to write.
Woody Allen
#63. The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code,
Douglas McIlroy
#64. I transform "Work" in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real "Work" - of writing.)
for:
the "Work" by which (it is said) we emerge from the great crises (love, grief) cannot be liquidated hastily: for me, it is accomplished only in and by writing.
Roland Barthes
#65. There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write. What
Steven Pressfield
#66. But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve.
Mary Oliver
#67. Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique ... and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity - a bookish triumvirate.
Briar Kit Esme
#68. Fucking hell. Shit sounds like I'm writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue. Unending vortex of ugly? Holy sensationalism, Batman! Who the fuck am I writing for? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I'll just fail like every other journalist
Marlon James
#69. To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.
William Gibson
#70. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
#71. For such a long time, when you're a writer, you really are just writing for yourself, and maybe a few friends. So it's really amazing when your book gets out there and more people are reading and responding to it. It really makes the world of the books feel real.
Cassandra Clare
#72. If you can't challenge your own way of thinking, then you can't write various perspectives. The real world rarely agrees, which is also true in fiction.
G.P. Burdon
#73. 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.
#74. Writers who have the vision and the ability to produce real fiction do not produce unreal fiction.
Raymond Chandler
#75. Humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?
Charles Stross
#76. What happens is, especially when I was writing for my band, Creedence, and it's the way I write now, I go into "guitar lick" mode. When I do, it sort of leads into a real song. I'd say to myself, your songwriting is coming up with a guitar lick, and the rest is easy!
John Fogerty
#77. I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world ... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts.
David Guterson
#78. The cookbooks and the writing in general have been a real bonus, but it's not something I've ever pursued ... I've been lucky, I guess.
Padma Lakshmi
#79. When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.
Michael Foreman
#80. The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!
Lu Xun
#81. Well, I've never met an indexer any more than I've met a real writer. I'm impressed." Miss Finch's tone had changed, and she was suddenly leaning toward me, almost half over the counter. "Tell me, do you make any real money at this job, writing indexes for books?
Larry D. Sweazy
#82. I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real
the lives I had read about in books.
Dorothy Allison
#83. Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.
Linus Torvalds
#84. Enthusiasm is big. When I write a book, it's a three-year commitment. Toward the end, I'm writing seven days a week, and it's exhausting but thrilling. The only hope is to have some real enthusiasm for the book ... Above all, you need some strong emotional or personal connection to your material.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#85. [Writing something original from scratch], the initial process is way different. But once it exists and you start to actually work on making it real, then the approach is kind of the same, for me anyways.
Zack Snyder
#86. I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.
Brian Kernighan
#87. The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.
Iain M. Banks
#88. I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."
Jon Weisman
#89. My first real writing job was at 'Rolling Stone,' so I wrote about rock-and-roll and politics and the like. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to write, and I did a bunch of investigative journalism.
Tim Cahill
#90. Complexity control is the central problem of writing software in the real world
Eric S. Raymond
#91. The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
Jonathan Franzen
#92. What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story.
Jim Bishop
#93. [While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail.
David McCullough
#94. Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.
Rebecca West
#95. Oh, it's essential. I mean, you have to - if I'm writing about the Middle East, I have to go there, and if possible, stay long enough to get a real feeling for what's going on.
Joe Sacco
#96. I think when you write an enigmatic character into a film, you have to have real confidence that the audience are going to go with it.
Gemma Arterton
#97. This is where I think the writing started. The "righting," if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.
Robert McCammon
#98. The essence of real creativity is a certain playfulness, a flitting from idea to idea without getting bogged down by fixated demands. Of course, you don't always get what you thought you were asking for.
Vernor Vinge
#99. In the life of a real writer, nothing is ever lost, no word you write is a waste of your time or energy.
Larry Brooks
#100. When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'
Jane Lindskold
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