Top 100 Writing About Quotes
#1. I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.
Jack Black
#2. Thinking about writing isn't writing. Planning to write isn't writing. Neither is talking about it, posting about it, or complaining how hard it is. These may be part of the process. But only writing is writing.
Jack Ketchum
#3. Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
Virginia Woolf
#4. (The new boyfriend) knows I write every day for hours but has no idea that all I'm writing about is me. It seems wiser to let him think I'm an aspiring novelist instead of just an alcoholic with a year of sobriety who spends eight hours a day writing about the other 16.
Augusten Burroughs
#5. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.
Lily King
#6. Conservatives don't want to read good, smart books. They mostly want to read Fox and talk radio hosts writing about presidents.
Alex Pareene
#7. But [Patrick's] character is partly based on a boy named Mark who lived across the street from me when I was growing up ... I liked hanging out with him and was sad when he moved away after only a year in the neighborhood. I guess writing about Patrick is a way for me to spend more time with Mark.
Linda Sue Park
#8. I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.
Geoff Zanelli
#9. I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it.
Christopher Owens
#10. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.
Avi
#11. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...
Wallace Stegner
#12. 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
#13. I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#14. Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.
John Wayne
#15. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.
Ernest Cline
#16. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#17. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.
Neale Donald Walsch
#18. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#19. 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
#20. It's often hilarious to me that I'm writing about Tonga or some tropical place and there's a blizzard outside and the cows are on their backs with their hooves in the air.
Tim Cahill
#21. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Octavia Butler
#22. And here I sit, writing about him as though he's just a ghost from my past that still haunts me. And I guess that is all he is now. Just some guy I used to know.
Dawn Kurtagich
#23. If I describe a person's physical appearance in my writing, which I often do, especially in fiction, I never say someone is "black" or "white." I may describe the color of their skin - black eyes, beige skin, blue eyes, dark skin, etc. But I'm not talking about race.
Jamaica Kincaid
#24. I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.
Patricia Hampl
#25. The danger in writing about a world you don't know very well is that you can get lost in it, and sometimes I'll end up with a hundred pages I don't know what to do with.
Dan Chaon
#26. Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.
Joe Eszterhas
#27. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.
Katherine Center
#28. Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
Enya
#29. Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.
Criss Jami
#30. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.
Betsy Lerner
#31. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.
Paul Raymond Martin
#32. I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing ... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.
Claire Cameron
#33. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
Samuel Colbran
#34. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
#35. If I come across an issue, or something I feel strongly about, and I happen to think of a song that would go in that direction, then I do it. But that's not what I start out, necessarily, to do. Sometimes I may have an idea for a song - Well, I'm going to write about a thing.
Charlie Daniels
#36. You could do a 'Les Mis'-type musical about Hamilton, but it would have to be 12 hours long, because the amount of words on the bars when you're writing a typical song - that's maybe got 10 words per line.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
#37. Write about it by day and dream about it by night.
E.B. White
#38. Write what you want to write; don't fear about who will read it.
Debasish Mridha
#39. Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.
Mordecai Richler
#40. You're too busy writing the next book to worry about Googling yourself all the time.
Annette Curtis Klause
#41. I've found for the last couple of years that the things that I can become most deeply involved with are songs that reflect my real feelings about things and so that what I've been writing about.
Neil Diamond
#42. I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.
Brian Helgeland
#43. Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#44. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#45. I only write books about dead people. They can't sue.
Pierre Berton
#46. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#47. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
#48. One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.
Sam Kean
#49. This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.
C.S. Lewis
#50. Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)
George V. Higgins
#51. We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
Sue Monk Kidd
#52. Sugar Ray and talked about doing some articles together or writing a book together but dealing with Sugar Ray was a lot like fighting him. He would fake you in and then he'd drop you.
Dick Schaap
#53. I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.
Markus Zusak
#54. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
Garrison Keillor
#55. I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.
Naguib Mahfouz
#56. When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
A. Saleh
#57. I write about nuclear tests in Refuge - "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.
Terry Tempest Williams
#58. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#59. Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.
Colbie Caillat
#62. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#63. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#64. 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
#65. I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
William T. Vollmann
#66. With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing.
Gunter Grass
#67. I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.
R. YS Perez
#68. Either way, you wrote the book and now you're complaining about the reviews I'm giving it," I quipped.
"Fair enough." He held up his hands, "I'm going to start writing the sequel which will be considerably less narcissistic. Will you read it?"
"Only if every other girl on campus hasn't.
Tarryn Fisher
#69. Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story
it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story.
L.M. Montgomery
#70. I've always thought flight was fun and wanted to write about flight, and I knew a lot of househusbands who were having a really bad time with it. I thought flight might perk up a marriage here or there.
Steven Amsterdam
#71. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#72. The demand in India is to have a hit, which becomes a promotion for the movie and makes people come to the theater. You have five songs and different promotions based on those. But when I do Western films, the need for originality is greater. Then I become very conscious about the writing.
A.R. Rahman
#73. Middle-age should be shot. Things about it gall me. First, that those younger despise the thought of getting old, and, hence, me. Second, that those older despise the thought of me being younger, and, hence, me. So here I am, pressed from both sides, forced to wear blinders - FULL SPEED AHEAD!
Chila Woychik
#74. I had to be the world's biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
Benjamin Alire Saenz
#75. Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
Lisel Mueller
#76. I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.
Robin Hobb
#77. The thing about being a songwriter is,even if you been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Everything has something to do with something; nothing is divorced. It becomes an experience,a feeling or a aconglomeration of experiences ...
Keith Richards
#78. 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
#79. There are two kinds of people in boxing. Those who say, 'Oh, boy; Tom Hauser is writing an article about me,' and those who say, 'Big problem; Tom Hauser is writing an article about me.'
Jim Lampley
#81. Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids
Diana Gabaldon
#82. How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.
Jerry Stahl
#83. I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.
Dorothy Allison
#84. Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they might note that, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the United States succeeded in its great and historic mission
it globalized the world. But along the way, they might write, it forgot to globalize itself.
Fareed Zakaria
#85. Sometimes writing about a TV show, or a movie, or a book, is the most honest way to write about yourself.
Aaron Burch
#86. With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.
Cheryl Strayed
#87. I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.
Mandy Moore
#88. I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
#89. I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!
Robert B. Parker
#90. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#91. I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.
Hanya Yanagihara
#92. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
#93. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#94. I'm just very sort of compulsive and lack the ability to keep things in perspective. If I'm not writing or playing guitar or on the microphone or out on the road, I'm cleaning pots and pans or freaking out about some plumbing issue or tweeting.
Marc Maron
#95. I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.
Darin Strauss
#96. Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
#97. I don't usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships.
Bob Dylan
#98. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#99. I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
Taylor Mali
#100. Silk Road to Ruin has all the analysis and it's structured very well. I rely on my notes more and I use direct quotes. But there's nothing like writing about it right away.
Ted Rall
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