Wall Writing Sayings

#1. The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

Edna Ferber

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

Eric Ries

#3. The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages.

David Foster Wallace

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

Michael Shanks

#5. I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

Stephen King

#6. 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

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

Banksy

#8. When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.

E.L. Doctorow

#9. If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

Anton Chekhov

#10. Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

John Berger

#11. Laura thought Bell would have a few things to say to Pynchon. And Laura had a few things to say to Bell, like, How the hell was a writer supposed to know when she was one-fifth through her novel-writing, so she could cut a door into the wall and shove her character out into the forest?

L.L. Barkat

#12. If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.

Stephen King

#13. 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

#14. Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

Joseph Conrad

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

Alan Bennett

#16. The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.

Moderation in moderation.

Fun is scary with a happy ending.

Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.

Emily Thornton Calvo

#17. Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else

William S. McFeely

#18. Writing-wise, I like to have a lot of things on the burners at once, because when I hit a wall, I like to move on to the thing I haven't hit a wall on.

Zoe Kazan

#19. What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

Larry Wall

#20. To my words: There was once a wall between us. Now we walk together and greet the world.

A.D. Posey

#21. Writing is throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.

Kelly E. Lindner

#22. I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake.

Washington Irving

#23. For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

Larry Wall

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

Adam Gopnik

#25. 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

#26. My writing philosophy is throwing spaghetti against the wall. That's how I take pictures, too. If I take 100, surely one will be good.

Amanda Peet

#27. Facebook is like jail, you sit around and waste time, you write on walls and you get poked by people you don't know

Will Ferrell

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

Simon Heffer

#29. Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.

Edward Abbey

#30. We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. "No right on red" is a rule. "Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly" is an observation.

Howard Mittelmark

#31. Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards.

Toni Morrison

#32. If you write something wrong enough, I'll be glad to make up a new witticism just for you.

Larry Wall

#33. 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

#34. I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall.

Bruce Greenwood

#35. Plasma on the wall/Write my name on your heart like I'm Lucille Ball/But love changes, a thug changes/And best friends become strangers

Ras Kass

#36. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]

Cormac McCarthy

#37. 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

#38. A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

John Irving

#39. 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

#40. In the 18th Century William Blake saw Heaven in a grain of sand. Most people nowadays can't even see the writing on the wall.

Dean Cavanagh

#41. There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

Phyllis Theroux

#42. 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

#43. Writing stays. It fastens words down. A man can speak his mind and some nasty wee scuggan will write it down and who knows what he'll do with those words? Ye might as weel nail a man's shadow tae the wall!

Terry Pratchett

#44. Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!

Tom Lehrer

#45. Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

Geraldine Brooks

#46. 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,

#47. No no there wasn't any planned 14th season, we all saw the writing on the wall. The ratings had been going down and so fourth, that curve goes on every show and in everybody's life.

Larry Hagman

#48. When I was in the gulag I would sometimes even write on stone walls. I used to write on scraps of paper, then I memorised the contents and destroyed the scraps.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#49. I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

Lauren Groff

#50. I didn't think one day something would happen that would bring me back to Wall Street to write what is essentially a sequel.

Michael Lewis

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Cynthia Ozick

#58. 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

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

Stevie Wonder

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

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

Doris Betts

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

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

Larry Wall

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#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. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

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

George Takei

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

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

Larry Wall

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

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

Frank Yerby

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.

Peter Straub

#98. 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

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

Andrew Vachss

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

Virginia Woolf