To Write Quotes

#1. For stand-up comedians that go onstage and get to write and perform and direct, and do all these things, the allure of a television show is still there but if it doesn't offer a level of creative fulfillment, it's oddly unappealing.

Jim Gaffigan

#2. The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Chuck Palahniuk

#3. Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.

Helen DeWitt

#4. One of the things about what ... I do - writing plays - is that a poll is not taken before you say, Well, I'm going to write this because I think that you're going to like this and therefore you'll buy a ticket for this.

Wendy Wasserstein

#5. I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

Sara Paretsky

#6. I can plunk out enough chords to write a song, but I'm completely afraid to play guitar in front of other people. It's a fear of failure, I guess.

Mandy Moore

#7. Every time I'm home from tour I try to write some new songs, but it can get really hard trying to keep up with normal life, I always get so behind.

Tim Lambesis

#8. At a certain point, I got used to writing on demand. I developed a habit of writing like I hired myself! I also like to write about things that affect me emotionally.

Jake Holmes

#9. I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.

John Updike

#10. There's certain things as a songwriter that I don't really care to write about, and there are certain things I won't sing about anymore. There are just so many things that I probably thought was OK for me, or have been in the past, that I would never want my son to think was OK.

Randy Houser

#11. When I see somebody being mistreated, my eyes tear up and I want to stop it. And I believe that the best thing I can do is to write about it, because if I insert myself into the equation it doesn't really do much good, but if I write about it I think it could do more good.

John Pomfret

#12. No to write, for many of us, is to die.

Ray Bradbury

#13. Even if you have nothing to write, write and say so.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#14. It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

Sara Paretsky

#15. I hate to force anything. A lot of people say that comedy is twenty percent truth, and eighty percent fallacy. I believe that you have to have lived through something to write about it.

Tone Bell

#16. Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic.

Eric Allin Cornell

#17. A writer writes
regardless ...
even though ...
notwithstanding ...
despite ...
at any rate ...
anyhow ...
nevertheless ...
in the face of ...
undeterred by ...
heedless of ...
and because.
The true writer simply continues to write.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#18. Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence.

Wayne Koestenbaum

#19. Romantic comedies are backbreaking to write because they have to be fresh.

Mike Newell

#20. My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.

David Levithan

#21. I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.

Nikki Reed

#22. A nation that is Christian at its heart doesn't need to write it into law.

Ralph Peters

#23. A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

Aleksandar Hemon

#24. My reason for being an author? Because I love to write - it fulfills me. But the fact that I entertain others by doing it is a lovely bonus.

Chasta Schneider

#25. I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

Robert Morgan

#26. As a teenager, I wanted to write novels. By college, it was theater, plays, and then, shortly, it was film.

Richard Linklater

#27. For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

Lou Reed

#28. You want an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.

Andy Weir

#29. Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

Maggie Stiefvater

#30. The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). Say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem-at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

Warren Buffett

#31. I'm writing from a place of - a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.

K'naan

#32. In order for me to write a scene, it's very important for me to see and experience everything with my own eyes, so yes, I was able to visit some remarkable houses and destinations while I was in China.

Kevin Kwan

#33. I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

Oscar Wilde

#34. I'm not very disciplined. I tend to write late at night because I get distracted during the day.

Arthur Bradford

#35. I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.

Stephen Sondheim

#36. I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader.

Thom Gunn

#37. You say that like I have a choice. These are the ideas that come to me. These are the ideas that have always come to me. If it can bleed me,eat me, or fuck me, I want to write about it. -L.K. on why she writes about sex and monsters in 'Flirt' Afterword

Laurell K. Hamilton

#38. 'Ordinary Grace' freed me. I don't have to write only Cork O'Connor novels now. I'm liberated. I can write whatever I want to write.

William Kent Krueger

#39. It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people.

Alexander McCall Smith

#40. The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.

Richard Bach

#41. You have to have passion for a subject to write about it. You can't expect your readers to feel any excitement if it's nothing but a boring writing exercise for you.

Leonard Mlodinow

#42. Would it be nice to look like Gemma Ward? Sure. But I have an incredible brain and the ability to write, and I make people laugh pretty much every day. I wouldn't give that up for anything. Those are the things I've learned to value.

Rosie Waterland

#43. I told him that I can play it if he wanted to write it, and I would be willing to try and go there emotionally. I did not know as an actress if I would be able to get there, because when you feel really deep emotions or pain, you don't want to go back there.

Hunter Tylo

#44. I had always wanted to write a song called, The Vicious Circle. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there.

Mac Davis

#45. To write a novel is to dream a story and write it down on the page. That's why the power of a really good story is one of true magic. Good stories engage the reader utterly in the writer's dream so the dream becomes theirs, too.

Wendy J. Dunn

#46. Personal accounts flow from the heart and tend to be the most difficult to write. It's nearly impossible to remove the emotional undertones, and it takes so much courage to open those pages to everyone else.

Javier A. Robayo

#47. I often wonder if I had the complete freedom to not have to write, if I would write. That's the one mystery that I hope I get to experience.

Nick Tosches

#48. A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

#49. Don't try to write a novel. Write short stories and then figure out how to connect them.

Ray Bradbury

#50. I'm not going to write for posterity. I'm going to write to make a buck.

Elmore Leonard

#51. I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.

Frances Mayes

#52. O white-robed Angel, guide my timorous hand to write as on a lofty rock with iron pen the words of truth, that all who pass may read.

William Blake

#53. Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.

Claude Debussy

#54. So grateful for your continued belief in my books. I'd like to thank, most importantly, the fans who have made my career possible, who inspire and galvanize me to write more and better.

Lauren Oliver

#55. I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other.

Juan Felipe Herrera

#56. I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one - And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press.

Charles Darwin

#57. I have a website because it's an interesting tool, very - and quite unexpectedly - useful for my work. It's become an archive and a fairly complete on-line portfolio, as well as offering an opportunity to write a little.

John Howe

#58. It is nice when things end. That is what stories do - they end. It is hard to write endings and it is hard to come to the end of things, but I think when it is done right, it is a very satisfying way to appreciate something.

Jon Hamm

#59. 6If I want to write, I write. So just do it. If you think that making time for writing is a problem, just wait until you finish a book, and find a great aching desert of emptiness stretching before you.

Thorne Moore

#60. Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to.

Charles Dance

#61. I never got any training in how to write novels as an English major at Oberlin, but I got some great training for writing novels from anthropology and from Margaret Mead.

Alan Furst

#62. I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

John Irving

#63. My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

Susan Sontag

#64. To my mother, who always told me to write about what I know. I'm fairly sure she didn't actually mean this.

John Wiltshire

#65. You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'Write how you are but make it straight.

Ernest Hemingway,

#66. Starting is hard so I really need to give myself permission to do a bad job. I always give myself leave to write total nonsense for as long as I need to release the pressure, because it's really hard to start if you feel like that first sentence you write has to actually mean something.

Ann Brashares

#67. It's harder to write a story with just two people in a room than with 50 characters.

Michael Haneke

#68. I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.

William Gibson

#69. I have a great amount of confidence and faith in my abilities to write. There are other areas of my life where I'm not as confident, and have not as much faith, but when it comes down to writing and working, I don't worry about it. I trust myself to get it right.

James Frey

#70. I love to write.

Kara Hayward

#71. If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine.

Fernando Pessoa

#72. I'm a more skilled writer now, but after 23 books it's harder to be fresh and that's really important to me. I don't want to write the same thing over and over again.

Judy Blume

#73. When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

Michael Chabon

#74. I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around.

Andy Gibb

#75. To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

Arthur Honegger

#76. I set out to write books, to be surrounded by generous, brilliant people, and to have great adventures.

Rebecca Solnit

#77. Mum's serial misbehavior over the years had driven me, despairing, to write her scolding - occasionally scalding letters.

Christopher Buckley

#78. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

Salman Rushdie

#79. They asked me to write it and zoomed me over there to do it. But they ended up sacking me.

Eddie Campbell

#80. We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

Julia Cameron

#81. The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.

Henry Miller

#82. I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' and 'The Jungle Book.' Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.

Michael Morpurgo

#83. If you don't read you will have nothing to write.

Debasish Mridha

#84. When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

C. K. Williams

#85. Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

Donald Hall

#86. I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where I'd give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.

Adam Faith

#87. I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

Sarah MacLean

#88. It's usually a big kind of vent of frustration or anger or sadness that puts me in the right frame of mind to write. It's such a cliche to say that artists write when they're down, but it's true for me. It's a relief to get out what's eating away at my heart or my soul or my head.

Ellie Goulding

#89. I wanted to write and think. Activism is a displacing kind of passion.

Randall Robinson

#90. Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Ray Bradbury

#91. woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and

Virginia Woolf

#92. Then I thought I was going to be a photographer. I tried a hand at darkroom technician. I played in a band. It took me quite some time to discover that I wanted to write.

Guy Johnson

#93. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.

Gail Sher

#94. Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.

Vikram Seth

#95. One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

Carly Simon

#96. In Japan, more than in any other country I've ever been in, one is not supposed to write about the people in the glass bubble; that is why they are in the glass bubble.

John Burnham Schwartz

#97. Nothing is easier to write than scenery; nothing more difficult and unnecessary to read.

Jerome K. Jerome

#98. I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs.

Taylor Swift

#99. Melville locked himself away in his room for months while working on 'Moby Dick.' If I ever decide to write a novel, I hope someone will take pity on me and take me out to dinner instead.

Marge Simon

#100. The pen is mightier than the sword - It's also easier to write with!

Benny Hill