Top 56 Writing Habit Quotes
#2. Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
Caroline Lawrence
#3. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
John Steinbeck
#4. I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.
Barbara Mertz
#5. My most pronounced writing habit is trying not to write.
Anna Quindlen
#6. It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease.
Samuel Johnson
#7. When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.
John Edgar Wideman
#8. The mere habit of writing, of constantly keeping at it, of never giving up, ultimately teaches you how to write.
Gabriel Fielding
#9. If there is one 'scientific' discovery I am proud of, it is the discovery of the habit of writing without publication in mind.
Edsger Dijkstra
#10. I had this bad habit of not writing out a first draft and going back. For me it was the first sentence, then the second sentence, and I might be several weeks on the first page instead of writing a draft and trying to figure it out from there.
Donald Ray Pollock
#11. One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into
a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.
Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,
physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
Niyi Osundare
#12. Form the habit of writing your thoughts. The mechanical element assists the power of concentration.
T. Sharper Knowlson
#13. Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.
Damon Galgut
#14. Habit is the best thing for you if you're trying to write prose.
Alan Cheuse
#15. Letter writing is a habit that allows us to explore new trails all our lives. Each day is a fresh new adventure when we regularly send and receive letters.
Alexandra Stoddard
#16. I have seen too many men wilt and go silly under a little light, and then they continue to write and get published, turning out pure crap under a name that has become a bad habit. The next poem is all that counts. You can't stand on past poems.
Charles Bukowski
#17. I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.
Dave Barry
#18. The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.
Anthony Trollope
#19. When I left the theatre and turned to writing, one of the big pulls was that, unlike the theatre, I didn't have to wait to be hired before I could do my art. That was huge. But you still have to figure out how to support your habit; it's rare and lucky when art pays the bills.
Debra Dean
#20. I like to feel that every day or most days, I do a little bit of writing. I am a creature of habit in terms of the way I live.
Mary Chapin Carpenter
#21. When I started writing this blog more than years ago, it was in response to traditional media's habit of twisting interviews to fit the headlines they wanted to create.
Mark Cuban
#22. But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
Virginia Woolf
#23. The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
Virginia Woolf
#24. The best kind of happiness is a habit you're passionate about.
Shannon L. Alder
#25. I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.
Donald Ray Pollock
#26. I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.
Corey Haim
#27. My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration.
Anne Lamott
#28. I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.
Patrick White
#29. At a certain point, I got used to writing on demand. I developed a habit of writing like I hired myself! I also like to write about things that affect me emotionally.
Jake Holmes
#30. Writing is self-expression and no matter how complex the idea might be in the head when it is put in paper, it simplifies. It gives pleasure. It keeps track of who we are. Keeping a habit of writing is very beneficial to anyone. It is a bliss.
Bishwas Mishra
#31. I had developed this habit of writing scenarios as a hobby. I would find out which stories had been sold to be made into films and I would write my own treatment and then compare it.
Satyajit Ray
#32. 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
#33. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
Octavia E. Butler
#34. Keeping a habit, in the smallest way, protects and strengthens it. I write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to keep my habit of daily writing strong.
Gretchen Rubin
#35. How do I happen to believe in God? . . . Writing novels, I got into the habit of looking for plots. After awhile, I began to suspect that my own life had a plot. And after awhile more, I began to suspect that life itself has a plot. - FREDERICK BUECHNER
Sarah Arthur
#36. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.
Toni Morrison
#38. Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
#40. My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.
Lynn Abbey
#41. The habit of prayer communicates a penetrating sweetness to the glance, the voice, the smile, the tears,
to all one says, or does, or writes.
Philibert Joseph Roux
#42. I usually have poor to absent relations with editors because they have a habit of desiring changes and I resist changes.
William H Gass
#43. Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
E.B. White
#44. I like writing, and I enjoy it. It's painful. You can't get around the pain of writing. I'm still trying to balance on what I think is my creative habit. It varies, but I do know that I need to continue. It helps me with my acting, and the writing helps me be invested in a different way.
Gbenga Akinnagbe
#45. Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life.
Sahara Sanders
#46. Throughout my early career, I would write from five to ten in the morning every day before going to my office, a habit that has stayed with me since.
Warren Adler
#47. It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate
#48. Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
David Guterson
#49. I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.
Samuel Johnson
#50. I drank in his smell, I'd missed him so much more than I'd realised. Despite dreaming of him every night, besides my secret habit of writing Honour Hussain in curled scripts on every scrap piece of paper, I surprised myself by how much I needed him.
Ruth Ahmed
#51. Make a habit of reading what is being written today and what has been written before. Writing is learned by imitation.
William Zinsser
#52. The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Henry Adams
#53. Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
Lord Acton
#54. If I had had a thing like an iPad when I was a kid, then I never would have gotten into the habit of writing things down by hand.
Joe Haldeman
#55. I think it is because I have a habit, when I am bored or disgusted with people of stepping suddenly into my own world and shutting the door. People resent this
I suppose it is only natural to resent a door being shut in your face. They call it slyness when it is only self-defense.
L.M. Montgomery
#56. I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit - the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
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