The Writing Is On The Wall Quotes

#1. We want to keep believing in our ideas even when the writing is on the wall.

Eric Ries

#2. Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

Alan Bennett

#3. During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.

Bootsy Collins

#4. Birdy never felt artistic inclination when armed with a marking implement. What came to her were words, always words, commentary and criticism and correction and simple vocabulary curios; she scratched a few of them on the smooth red wall.

Antonya Nelson

#5. Social media is like ancient Egypt: writing things on walls and worshiping cats.

George Takei

#6. When that little clock on my wall says "Olaotan! Olaotan!! Olaotan!!! It's half past time to write", I only have three things at my disposal: A pen, A piece of paper, and a crowded mind.

Olaotan Fawehinmi

#7. I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo."
"Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?

Chuck Palahniuk

#8. With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

Jim Rash

#9. His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest.

Jandy Nelson

#10. Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.

Larry Wall

#11. Computer programming is really a lot like writing a recipe. If you've read a recipe, you know what the structure of a recipe is, it's got some things up at the top that are your ingredients, and below that, the directions for how to deal with those ingredients.

Larry Wall

#12. Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

P.L. Travers

#13. If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Joyce Carol Oates

#14. Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.

Frank Yerby

#15. People like Pete Peterson, the former secretary of commerce and Blackstone and titan of Wall Street, etc., has been writing books for years about the debt and deficit.

Mario Cuomo

#16. I grew up wearing black arm-bands when the hunger strikers died. I went on those marches. I grew up basically a Provo, though I never obviously got into any activities. I was writing 'IRA, Brits out' on walls all over where I grew up, but that was a false sense of Irishness.

Glen Hansard

#17. Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.

Alan Bennett

#18. Her name, he says like the Lord's taken in vain. Sometimes he says "Mexico," and the word has nothing in it at all. A wall with no colors painted on it.

Barbara Kingsolver

#19. Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.

Donald Glover

#20. There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there's a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.

Stephen King

#21. He who commits a wrong will himself inevitably see the writing on the wall, though the world may not count him guilty.

Martin Farquhar Tupper

#22. I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

John Cage

#23. On his office wall he had a note to himself: 'Money is necessary
but it isn't too important.' Money meant for him to keep on writing and to go his own way.

Walter Farley

#24. Often the block [in writing] comes from the wall of words that keep out the simplicity of sense.

Adam Gopnik

#25. When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

Karl Kraus

#26. If at first you don't succeed, Call an airstrike.

Banksy

#27. The writing is definitely on the wall and no matter how pretty the ink looks, it will still bleed through and stain the layers beneath permanently.

K. Bromberg

#28. I think the writing on the wall is definitely there this year that this is probably our last year.

Michael Shanks

#29. The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Ernest Hemingway,

#30. Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall.

Christie Purifoy

#31. It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.

Robert Macfarlane

#33. If there is writing on Hadrian's Wall, it reads that the English should leave Scotland to its own devices.

Simon Heffer

#34. I'm fundamentally, I think, an outsider. I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It's an odd feeling though, writing aginst the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current. Yet of course I shall.

Virginia Woolf

#35. I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.

Sadegh Hedayat

#36. 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

#37. Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.

Damon Galgut

#38. THE INFERNAL DEVICES ARE WITHOUT PITY.
THE INFERNAL DEVICES ARE WITHOUT REGRET.
THE INFERNAL DEVICES ARE WITHOUT NUMBER.
THE INFERNAL DEVICES WILL NEVER STOP COMING.

Cassandra Clare

#39. At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.

Diane Setterfield

#40. I wouldn't ever write the full sentence myself, but then, I never use goto either.

Larry Wall

#41. My mind is like a little house,
My peers break into.
They rearrange my furniture,
And the cabinets rifle through.
They throw things out;
They put things in,
And erase the writing on the wall,
And by the time that they walk out,
It's not my mind at all.

Margo T. Rose

#42. The room boasted many luxurious perks: a narrow bed, a rotted writing table, a stained wall, and a warped looking glass dangling on a rusty hook. I wondered if Mr. Kent recommended this hellish place so I would hurry back to his home.

Tarun Shanker

#43. I dunno, when I started writing really I was like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex ... occasionally, stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls ...

Tom Waits

#44. All one needs to write a story is one feeling and four walls.

Doris Betts

#45. It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.

Diana Peterfreund

#46. I've had many students over the years, sometimes even very sophisticated students, who will be writing and will hit a wall. Often I find it's because they're working out of sequence. Maybe some people can do that, but I don't think that's how fiction works. It's a discovery.

T.C. Boyle

#47. People think I live here on Nantucket and just gaze at the ocean, getting my inspiration. Not so. I work in my basement and gaze out onto a single window that shows me a cement wall. This is a profession, and it's important to have professionalism about the writing.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#48. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.

Sophie Calle

#49. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing's true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it's necessary.

Anonymous

#50. He was a scholar, so goddamned intelligent he couldn't see the writing on the wall. He wanted answers to life's tragedies when their very unfair nature meant they had none.

Skye Warren

#51. Writing is when I fly, writing is when I start fires. Writing is when I take death out of my left pocket, throw him against the wall and catch him as he bounces back.

Charles Bukowski

#52. Smoking cigarettes and writing something nasty on the wall, teacher sends you to the Principal's office down the hall.

Stevie Wonder

#53. If you covered a broom handle with oil and shoved it up my arse, then put me on a trampoline, in a lift, I could write a better song on the walls.

Dylan Moran

#54. If a novel's salient aim is virtue, I want to throw it against the wall.

Cynthia Ozick

#55. By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

Stephen King

#56. Whether the darken'd room to muse invite, Or whiten'd wall provoke the skew'r to write; In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgel I will rhyme and print.

Alexander Pope

#57. Difference between rich and wealthy? Wall Street bankers are rich but they are no wealthy.Wealthy people are the ones writing their checks.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#58. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

David Nicholls

#59. The fact that companies are getting into building power plants that collect their own CO2 on-site shows there's some leadership in that industry. Some industries have seen the writing on the wall: that carbon will have to be managed.

Klaus Lackner

#60. Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before 'the writing on the wall' and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.

Charlotte Bronte

#61. Writing is still like heaving bricks over a wall ...

Virginia Woolf

#62. It isn't much use writing slogans on a wall if you plan to total the building.

Andrew Vachss

#63. Writing a film is like building a brick wall. You have a plan, and you have the blocks. Then, somebody says, 'I think we'll take this stone out of here and put it over there. And while we're at it, let's make this stone red and that stone green.'

Leigh Brackett

#64. I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

Elmore Leonard