Writing Competition Quotes

#1. Chief Justice [John] Roberts compared judges to umpires, who apply rules they did not write and cannot change to the competition before them.

Orrin Hatch

#2. I know there's a lot of competition in the world of magazines and newspapers and we have to make headlines and be sensational and sell, and saying bad things about me is going to sell more papers than writing good things about me.

Madonna Ciccone

#3. My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great.

Nick Harkaway

#4. You don't have to be successful on a grand scale like winning a talent competition or writing a New York Times bestseller - if you have enough small things that you can be successful at then eventually they outshine all your failures.

Lindsey Rietzsch

#5. When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

Rory Kinnear

#6. Many writers are paralyzed by the thought that they are competing with everybody else who is trying to write and presumably doing it better ... Forget the competition and go at your own pace. Your only contest is with yourself.

William Zinsser

#7. You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.

Michael Winter

#8. I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Kate Atkinson

#9. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

Kate Atkinson

#10. Writing is not a competition, or a fear. Writing is an art, a passion, a love.

Kirsty-Anne Still

#11. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#12. I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.

Cassie Steele

#13. I started writing sketches with Dennis Kelly, who I ended up writing 'Pulling' with. We entered a BBC competition and did quite well, then started writing bits for other people's shows. You wheedle your way in, write pilots and eventually you end up writing a sitcom.

Sharon Horgan

#14. The other one was filled with loud and obnoxious tourists. Always boasting on winning a sand castle competition and seeing who could get tanned first. What a whacky bunch of people.

Erica Sehyun Song

#15. Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it.

Umberto Eco

#16. In New York and L.A., there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something. You end up having a conversation with how the world receives your work, especially if you are writing narrative, not fiction. Sometimes it is an awkward conversation. It's like group therapy.

Sloane Crosley

#17. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

Gilbert Sorrentino

#18. Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. - It is not fair. - He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. - I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it - but fear I must.

Jane Austen

#19. If you can master the opening, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

Darynda Jones