Top 100 Work Writing Quotes
#1. I don't understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It's very destructive. People who write books are destroyers.
A.S. Byatt
#2. Even though I've reached retirement age, I still plan to work - writing my investment newsletter, speaking at conferences, publishing books, and producing conferences like FreedomFest.
Mark Skousen
#3. He had great respect for a novelist like James. Pound knew about the concentration of energies required to write novels and also knew that he did not have such qualities, that his inspirations came more in flashes than in sustained work. Writing prose was difficult,
John Tytell
#4. It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.
Asa Larsson
#5. So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.
Jonathan Lethem
#6. As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
Joyce Carol Oates
#7. Being published is not a necessary validation or a path everyone wants to take with their work. Writing - and finishing - a novel is a great thing in itself, whether or not the book is published, or becomes widely-read or not.
Garth Nix
#8. Persons who reach the higher rungs in business management, selling, engineering, religious work, writing, acting & in every other pursuit get there by following conscientiously & continuously a plan for self-development & growth.
David J. Schwartz
#9. However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a factory: just a meaningless production of words.
Alice Driver
#10. It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#11. Music is my work, writing songs is my work, touring is my work, going into the studio is my work.
Burning Spear
#12. No one likes to work for free. To copy an artist's work and download it free is stealing. It's hard work writing and recording music, and it's morally wrong to steal it.
Gary Wright
#13. Don't people know that it's the hardest work in the world? Joseph Conrad said that he had loaded hundredweights of coal all day long on a ship in Amsterdam in the wintertime, and that is was nothing to the energy demanded for a day's work writing.
Mary Lee Settle
#14. Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.
Mary Lee Settle
#15. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#16. If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Russell Banks
#17. I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work.
Wilbur Smith
#18. It's about you putting in the work, practicing every day, and hopefully one day you write the song the whole world wants to get down to. And one day you're going to be sitting next to Ellen DeGeneres talking about how you broke records and rocked the Super Bowl!
Bruno Mars
#19. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#20. The brain. Where words mean something. The heart. Where words feel something. When both work together. Kaboom.
Jill Telford
#21. You can write and visualize goals all you want, but if you do not take action, your goals will never become a reality. To obtain a goal you have never before achieved will require tasks you have never before done.
Cameron C. Taylor
#22. Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.
Lauren Tarshis
#23. When I moved out to Los Angeles to get some film and television work, and couldn't get any ... I became a little isolated, a little terrified, and it's a good place to get writing, because you're so bored. So I wrote a few screenplays, and people notice those.
Clark Gregg
#24. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
George Orwell
#25. And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you're done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won't let your Right-brain do it's job ... Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.
Jeff Bollow
#26. In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.
Michael Kosser
#27. To me, it's not work. When I draw and I write, I find it relaxing. It's not like 9-to-5, where a man goes to a job and he isn't really interested in the job. Luckily, I get paid for doing what I'd do for nothing.
Bob Kane
#28. When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
Erin McKeown
#29. Well, this whole question of how you work out the narrative is very mysterious. It's a good deal more arbitrary than most people who don't do it would ever believe.
Joan Didion
#30. You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.
Bob Dylan
#32. I used to split my time between writing, music and painting. I would work on a book and then abandon it, start a band, do an album, quit music, then do a gallery show. Eventually I decided to give writing a serious shot.
Isaac Marion
#33. Singing didn't really come naturally to me, I don't think. I had to really work at it. I just kept singing. I never was really worried about it, though, because I was writing songs, and that was the most important thing to me.
Tom Odell
#34. A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
#35. Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
Walter Benjamin
#36. I don't want my writing to be work to read. My main goal is completely shameless entertainment. I want people to smile and giggle and enjoy the book. I'm not trying to save the world through literature.
Gail Carriger
#37. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#38. I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.
Donald Miller
#39. I always wanted to be a writer, but Alan Moore's work and help inspired me to write comics. In some ways the biggest influence on me writing was Punk. There was the idea that you could do something by simply doing it.
Neil Gaiman
#40. I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
Lynne Reid Banks
#41. I don't spend as much time drawing as I do writing and reading. That's the really work-intensive part. And by the time I have enough material, it's often way past due time to put the comic up, and I'm already behind schedule, and I have to kind of rush it.
Kate Beaton
#42. There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.
Philip Kitcher
#43. Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.
Jacques Villeneuve
#44. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#45. I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.
David McCullough
#46. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.
H. Raven Rose
#47. Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.
Elie Wiesel
#48. Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.
Ariel Gordon
#49. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Cheryl Strayed
#50. So we must work at our profession and not make anybody else's idleness an excuse for our own. There is no lack of readers and listeners; it is for us to produce something worth being written and heard.
Pliny The Younger
#51. While passing through an obscure nook of Notre Dame cathedral, Victor Hugo noticed the Greek work for fate carved in the stone. He imagined a tormented soul driven to engrave this word. From this seed sprang his monumental novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Alexander Steele
#52. Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.
Robin Hobb
#53. The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort.
Jamie L. Harding
#54. I start with an image, then I go from the image toward exploring the situation. Then I write a scene, and from the scene I find the character, from the character I find the larger plot. It's like deductive reasoning - I start with the smaller stuff and work backward.
Dan Chaon
#55. Sondheim is my god; I love the man. I learned a great deal about writing from his work, his lyrics, and his structure.
Richard LaGravenese
#56. There were times when depression, anxiety, whatever, would keep me from writing. I still get depressed and anxious, but I just don't let it stop me. I've just learned to move it to one side if I want to work.
David St. John
#57. There would be times when I got so much work that I didn't have time to write. School interfered with writing more than writing with school.
Amity Gaige
#58. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.
Rhianna Pratchett
#59. Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out.
Eli Roth
#60. 'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work.
Jerry Leiber
#61. I do occasionally get into that 'checking Twitter every five minutes' state - 'Please, help me avoid my work.' I have a writing room for when I get completely out of control, so I can put myself out of the Internet's reach.
Margo Lanagan
#62. Writing is the hardest physical work there is.
Tom Robbins
#63. Long before I fell in love with writing, I fell in love with reading. Sometimes, honestly, I feel like I'm cheating on my first love when I settle into my office chair to start work on the latest manuscript.
James A. Moore
#64. One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power.
Toni Morrison
#65. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.
Neil Gaiman
#66. Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.
Hermione Lee
#67. Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.
Caryl Churchill
#68. One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#69. I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
Hanya Yanagihara
#70. Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#71. For those you work with or interact with regularly .. get a notebook and write down positive aspects of each of those people.
Rhonda Byrne
#72. Mark Twain on George Ade's writing: I have been reading him [Ade] again, and my admiration overflows all limits. How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand.
George Ade
#73. Writing is challenging work because it's so easy to get consumed with how it's going, what's going to happen to it, who's going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.
Wayne Dyer
#74. Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.
Nicole Brossard
#75. The best advice I can give to any aspiring author is to write every single day. Work at the craft of writing. Take it seriously.
Andrea Davis Pinkney
#76. When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.
Ann Leckie
#77. I usually work seven days a week and rarely take vacations, which is both lame and unsustainable. I don't mind the idea of writing seven days a week, I suppose. Getting some work done early in the morning. But ideally I would love to take one day a week off.
Brad Listi
#78. And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books.
Marquis De Sade
#79. I don't like waiting around for work, and sometimes as an actor you're forced into that position, so that's sort of how I got into writing, producing and directing.
Thomas Ian Nicholas
#80. Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
Meagan Spooner
#81. To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.
Aldous Huxley
#82. It's the hardest work in the world to try not to work. - N.C. Wyeth
Mason Currey
#83. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.
Robert Black
#84. My first love is writing and producing. So I sometimes put my own stuff off to work on other people's projects.
Missy Elliott
#85. It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.
Maira Kalman
#86. Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
#87. 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
#88. An unpublished writer should doubt themselves. They should constantly wonder whether what they're creating has merit. And then, having doubted, they should take up their pen and see if they can't make it better.
Johnny Rich
#89. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#90. It's a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one's work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious." Martha
Erik Larson
#91. I am very present in my work and my work is somehow an expression of my soul, but at the same time I think that a writer cannot write out of nothing.
Paulo Coelho
#92. My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.
Kathe Koja
#93. Writing is not glamorous - it's hard work. If you want to be a glamorous writer, wear purple nail varnish when you type.
Sue Cross
Sue Cross
#94. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.
George Stephen
#95. I'm very excited to work with everybody on 'The Bridge' - the cast, the writing staff, the executive producers - the show is really good. I'm very lucky to be a part of it.
Brian Van Holt
#96. Thank God For Writing, As Now I Can Work Until My Last Breath!
Latif Mercado
#97. My little notebooks were beginnings - they were the ground into which I dropped the seed ... I would work in this way when I was out in the crowds, then put the stuff together at home.
Walt Whitman
#98. Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.
W. W. Rouse Ball
#99. A number of bloggers in economics and the financial sector have risen to prominence through the sheer strength of their work. Note it was not their family connections nor ties to Ivy League schools or elite banks, but rather the strength of their research, analysis and writing.
Barry Ritholtz
#100. I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
James Surowiecki
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