Top 99 Writing Is Like 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. The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.
Michael Kruger
#3. I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.
Todd Barry
#4. 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
#5. Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.
Toby Keith
#6. Writing is a lot like life, the more you learn the more you realize that you don't have a clue
Carl Henegan
#7. I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
Simon McBurney
#8. One of the elements of writing that is most delightful to the engaged reader is the element of surprise. And one of the ways to surprise the reader is to set up an expectation that you then veer away from it at the last moment. A stitch in time saves the penny earned. Or something like that.
Douglas Wilson
#9. And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
Ezra Pound
#10. How many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely ...
John Geddes
#11. One thing that's paramount in my life is that I am alone. I'm a loner. And yet I have many friends and I don't feel lonely. And I even like my own company. But when I'm alone, it's to read or write. I'm in my thoughts. Mostly I'm learning.
Agnes Denes
#12. I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.
Jonathan Lethem
#13. Of course, like all organic processes, there is an ebb and a flow to writing. One does not exist without the other. The writer needs to be vigilant in protecting both, confident in the knowledge that the village will be there when we choose, finally, to open the door.
Lisa Unger
#14. Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie.
Peter Gould
#15. It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they're writing at all. To have one's writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.
Elizabeth Clements
#16. 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
#17. The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it.
Stephen Koch
#18. All writing is presumption, of course, since no one knows what it is like to be another human being.
Cynthia Ozick
#19. 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
#20. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#21. I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.
John Steinbeck
#23. 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
#24. I eat, breath and sleep and that makes me like everyone else. When I write, I become something much greater than flesh & bone; something that will stay behind long after that part of me is gone. Writing makes me special, readers make me everlasting.
C.K. Webb
#25. Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.
Truman Capote
#26. There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the mouth of a tunnel, they jam.
John Updike
#27. Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
Haruki Murakami
#28. Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity.
Harold Brodkey
#29. [Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anais Nin
#30. There is nothing like been consumed by the blazing fire of untold story.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#31. 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
#32. Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.
Sarah Dessen
#33. The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#34. Now that I'm in 'Nashville,' the thing that I'm loving the most is co-writing. You walk into the room and you shake hands with someone you've never met before and you walk out four hours later and you've got this thing ... sharing ideas and everything, it's almost magical, like a miracle.
Chip Esten
#35. Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#36. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#37. Perhaps, writing is like the taste of honey sucked from flowers in a garden, each tasting differently.
Anu Lal
#38. I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.
Lalla Ward
#39. Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Ray Bradbury
#41. I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.
Jean M. Auel
#42. Writing is beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it.
Mark Leidner
#43. Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.
Zooey Deschanel
#44. 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
#45. Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.
Dan Chaon
#46. You can find me in the melodies, the chord progressions, the song style and structure. The lyrical places you fine me most are in the lyrics that 'show' more than 'tell.' I like to describe what the listener is seeing and let them make up the middle rather than telling them.
Kristian Bush
#47. Writing the middle of a novel is a lot like driving through Texas. You think it's never going to end, and the scenery looks the same.
Carolyn Wheat
#48. Asking for advice about what you should write is a little like asking for help getting dressed. I can you tell you what I think looks good, but you have to wear it. And as every fashion victim knows, very few people look good in everything.
Betsy Lerner
#49. I write every day. Writing is a necessity - like eating.
Mary MacLane
#50. When people climb a mountain, they don't stay there. They come back down and tell everyone they climbed a mountain. Writing a book is like that. If you write a book, you should tell everyone.
Bob Howard
#51. I think the advantage we had with "MacGruber" is the speed we had to put it together. We had a such a short period to write the movie and such a post-[production] period, it was almost like the way that the show worked, where everything is happening so fast you have to go with your gut.
Will Forte
#52. I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.
Barack Obama
#53. One of the reasons I write in different genres is that I get to have the feeling - even fleetingly - that I'm not just writing like Baggott again. I can escape myself.
Julianna Baggott
#54. I think that every decision I make in my life is based off of an emotion - and it definitely hurts me in some situations, and helps in some situations, like obviously writing and stuff is my favourite thing to do because I get to use all of my emotions and express them in that way.
Melanie Martinez
#55. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.
Jennifer Haigh
#56. Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
Katrina Monroe
#57. So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.
Hanya Yanagihara
#58. Writing is done by someone. It is not, like some mythical goddess, a skill that springs forth, full grown from the genes of inspiration ...
Leonard Bishop
#59. Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.
Kate Braverman
#60. I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.
Julia Stiles
#61. 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
#62. I've been asked which of the other arts novel-writing is most like, and I have come to believe it is acting. Of course, in terms of pattern it can be like music, in terms of structure it can be like painting, but the job to me is most like acting.
Andrew O'Hagan
#63. In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.
David Friedman
#64. The biggest misconception is that I only write about shitty people. Or that I'm trying to be shocking. I just think people are super weird, so I like to write characters that get addicted to things, lose their minds, hurt others, put themselves in bad situations. I'm just more interested in that.
Leslye Headland
#65. My mind is like a little house,
My peers break into.
They rearrange my furniture,
And the cabinets rifle through.
They throw things out;
They put things in,
And erase the writing on the wall,
And by the time that they walk out,
It's not my mind at all.
Margo T. Rose
#66. Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.
Eddie Cantor
#67. Yes, I am aware that I have become a caricature. I've thought about this. Conceptually, what I'd like to do is the equivalent of writing myself out of the script.
Phil Collins
#68. Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can't erase it.
E.B. White
#69. So I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to be doing with your life and it's like a magnet. It attracts.
Stephen King
#70. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#71. Writing is like making jewelry -jeweler doesn't make a diamond, he polishes and cuts it, but the gem is from God.
Bela Abel
#72. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
#73. I try to write about small insignificant things. I try to find out if it's possible to say anything about them. And I almost always do if I sit down and write about something. There is something in that thing that I can write about. It's very much like a rehearsal. An exercise, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#74. Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.
Meagan Spooner
#75. 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
#76. I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
#77. Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.
Bertolt Brecht
#78. Never submit an idea or chapter to an editor or publisher, no matter how much he would like you to. Writing from the approved idea is (another) gravely serious time-waster. This is your story. Try and find out what your editor wants in advance, but then try and give it to him in one piece.
John Creasey
#79. Writing is like cooking. You toss in a bunch of ingredients and hope the combination of flavors will appeal to someone's taste.
Dee Leone
#80. Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don't understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
Daniel Alarcon
#81. A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it, that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied, he is content.
Alfred North Whitehead
#82. Me writing about tennis is like a baker baking bread.
Ion Tiriac
#83. Writing the opening lines of a story is a bit like starting to ski at the steepest part of a hill. You must have all your skills under control from the first instant.
Marion Dane Bauer
#84. Grammar is to a writer what anatomy is to a sculptor, or the scales to a musician. You may loathe it, it may bore you, but nothing will replace it, and once mastered it will support you like a rock.
B. J. Chute
#85. 131/ Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned - plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies - are like love nips from your yippy little dog.
Kim Addonizio
#86. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#87. Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
#88. Foreshadowing is like playing cat and mouse. If done properly, it can be used to compel the reader to read on.
Mary Sage Nguyen
#89. How did writing come to me? Like bird's down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.
Rene Char
#90. I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.
Margaret Atwood
#91. A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.
Steve Lacy
#92. We like people for their qualities, but we love them for their defects." In writing this line I meant to say that we must not simply "accept" imperfection when it is revealed to us - we must celebrate it. This, I assure you, is the true sign of friendship.
Ron Perlman
#93. The importance is getting to something truthful and in that moment can only be in that moment. I don't like to use the word "improvise," but it's a continual writing of the film.
Abdellatif Kechiche
#94. The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic
to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.
Edward Albee
#95. I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff.
Oliver Sykes
#96. One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
Mark Twain
#97. Poetry is composing, you are writing words to move the world like music.
Atticus
#98. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.
Leah Cypess
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