Writing As Quotes

#1. Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way, only to realize that this stranger is as boring as shit.

Chuck Klosterman

#2. I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.

Jack Black

#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. 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

#5. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

Stephen King

#6. He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.

Galt Niederhoffer

#7. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

Tess Gerritsen

#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. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.

Louise Doughty

#10. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.

Michael Longley

#11. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.

Lisa J. Shultz

#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. A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes.

Baron De Montesquieu

#14. My favorite way of working is if somebody gives me a piece of music, because I'm quite limited as a player, so it's my favorite thing if somebody gives me a piece of music, and then I can write lyrics and melodies.

Sinead O'Connor

#15. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.

Ken Baumann

#16. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.

Paul Auster

#17. I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#18. People talk differently. You can say some things some places you can't say in other places. But me as a film maker, no words are ever going to be off limits in something I write. As long as people use the words, I'm going to report that.

Dax Shepard

#19. You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

Markus Zusak

#20. I will take any liberty I want with facts as long as I don't trespass on the truth ... We confuse facts with truth.

Farley Mowat

#21. 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

#22. I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

James A. Michener

#23. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.

Andrea Seigel

#24. There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Haruki Murakami

#25. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

Kingsley Amis

#26. 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

#27. As long as you're breathing, it's never too late to reconnect with a long-held love.

Gina Greenlee

#28. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.

Criss Jami

#29. 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

#30. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.

Stan D. Jensen

#31. As an author, I want to write what I'm inspired to write. Not what my readers want me to write. I feel like the books will ultimately be better if my heart is fully into what I'm writing.

Colleen Hoover

#32. It took a while to find a passion for another career that was as strong as the passion that I had for football. Once I found it in acting, it was simple. Use the tools you were given from playing football and apply it to your new passion. I have done that through acting, producing and writing.

Maurice Hall

#33. I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.

David Bergen

#34. It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it.

Stephen Sondheim

#35. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

Anne Waldman

#36. As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

#37. Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#38. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.

Stephen King

#39. 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

#40. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#41. 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

#42. The openness of such networked devices reflects our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library.

Jay David Bolter

#43. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

Deborah Lawrenson

#44. 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

#45. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.

Louisa May Alcott

#46. Plot joined the expedition unwooed, as a necessary companion. It was not the scout. The scout was a certain mood. I followed that mood, and let the shape of the story flow from that.

Bonnie Friedman

#47. 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

#48. Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

J.R. Ward

#49. If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.

Anne Stuart

#50. The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

Bob Shacochis

#51. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

Simon Schama

#52. Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

George V. Higgins

#53. Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can.

Anton Chekhov

#54. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.

Steve Coogan

#55. As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

George Bernard Shaw

#56. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.

Michelle Phan

#57. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.

Diana Gabaldon

#58. In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.

Brian P. Cleary

#59. 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

#60. I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

Edward Hirsch

#61. Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

Kevin Powers

#62. The awkwardness and embarrassment which all feel on beginning to write, when they themselves are the theme, ought to serve as a hint to author's that self is a subject they ought very rarely to descant upon.

Charles Caleb Colton

#63. A book acts as the getaway car when you need to escape.
Even when you're the one writing it.

Julie Wright

#64. 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

#65. Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called 'March of the Soviet Police.'

Edward Abbey

#66. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

#67. Dude, writing, acting and directing are such easy jobs. But to do them all as awesomely as Zach Braff does, well that ... that's something.

Zach Braff

#68. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.

Noah Hawley

#69. I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.

James Surowiecki

#70. I just always wrote songs as a side hobby. So it was sort of a natural thing to write comedy songs. But when I started writing songs, I wrote very serious songs. Or things that a 13-14 year-old would think are very serious issues.

Kyle Dunnigan

#71. I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.

Fran Lebowitz

#72. Described as a "workaholic speed-writing freak" by fellow writers, a "creative writing class drill sergeant" by his writing 'padawans', Voinov is a self-confessed geek and has enlarged his days by 12 secret hours in return for the sacrifice of ten albino virgin pygmy hippos.

Aleksandr Voinov

#73. Bright yellow leaves flowed swiftly upon the dark, almost-black water, making patterns as they went. To Mr. Segundus the patterns looked a little like magical writing. 'But then,' he thought, 'So many things do.

Susanna Clarke

#74. As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Virginia Woolf

#75. I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I've grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends.

Nicholas Haslam

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

Alberto Manguel

#79. I try to write three jokes every morning, although I don't know what they are. I write them as fast as I can, then I put them away for a month. So I couldn't even tell you what they are, or if they're good. I just assume they weren't.

Anthony Jeselnik

#80. A great deal of the bad writing in the world comes simply from writing too quickly. Of course you reply, "I do it to save time". A very good object, no doubt: but what right have you to do it at your friend's expense? Isn't his time as valuable as yours?

Lewis Carroll

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.

Ben H. Winters

#85. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

Truman Capote

#86. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

Morris West

#87. Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time
life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

Holly Lisle

#88. I always wanted to write movies that I'd direct. I didn't come at it from a writing standpoint more than a directing standpoint, except that growing up, I didn't have the opportunity to shoot as much as I did to write.

Noah Baumbach

#89. I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

Lawrence Wright

#90. If we see their (Navajo) lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary.

Natalie Goldberg

#91. As was the case in 'Darth Plagueis' - even going back as far as 'Cloak of Deception' - I was well aware that I was writing what used to be called 'men's adventure' fiction.

James Luceno

#92. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.

Wanda Lea Brayton

#93. With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

Jonathan Zittrain

#94. I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

Philipp Meyer

#95. Some of my affectionate envious friends say, "You write too much." Maybe, I answer. But as long as the best of your little is worse than the worst of my much, I will keep on doing so.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

#96. Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so.

Jack White

#97. I want to say that of course I want my writing to be read and discussed by as many people as possible, but this is different than wanting personal, "celebrity"-like attention. I'm very introverted and sensitive and dislike being talked about, positively or negatively.

Marie Calloway

#98. As long as you give my friend Jonah Lehrer a free pizza, I'll write a song about your restaurant.

Bob Dylan

#99. The goal is always just to write the best song that you can write. I mean, the process for writing a song is the process for writing a song. It's not something I look at it as something I need to do something different.

Chris Stapleton

#100. The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

Bankei Yotaku