Writing Is 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. 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. All you need is coffee, some cigarettes, and a Twitter account and your writing career begins! How far you go is determined by the followers you call friends.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#4. Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.

Mary Lee Settle

#5. Ms. Scarlett always delivers hot, sexy alphas and this isn't any different. Holy smokes, is this ever HOT! Love her writing and the way she spins a story but adds the HOT factor. Her alphas are phenomenal! - JC

Scarlett Avery

#6. Through lack of education, we're not teaching kids to read and write. So there is the danger that you raise up a generation of morons.

Ray Bradbury

#7. Writing is a struggle against silence.

Carlos Fuentes

#8. 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

#9. (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

#10. After the Beatles and Dylan, there's this assumption that you are a singer-songwriter, or that if someone else is writing your rhymes, you're a fake rapper.

Alan Light

#11. 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

#12. All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Antonin Artaud

#13. 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

#14. I guess that in a lot of ways, my writing is more of a character to me than something that I feel personally attached to.

Angel Olsen

#15. If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L'Amour

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

Stephen King

#17. Writing is a product of silence.

Carrie Latet

#18. Writing is thinking in slow motion.

Walter Kaufmann

#19. I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#20. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Stephen King

#21. The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#22. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Carl Sagan

#23. 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

#24. Writing a story I am just trying to find some little interesting thing to start out with: something small, even trivial. Preferably something that doesn't have a lot of thematic or political baggage - a little crumb that is interesting.

George Saunders

#25. Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ...

Wallace Stegner

#26. It is by sitting down to write every morning that he becomes a writer. Those who do not do this remain amateurs.

Gerald Brenan

#27. Everything is material for the seed of happiness, if you look into it with inquisitiveness and curiosity. The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment. There always is the potential to create an environment of blame -or one that is conducive to loving-kindness.

Pema Chodron

#28. Writing a novel that works is an extremely difficult thing to do. It requires a level of skill and dedication that always surprises me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#29. 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

#30. I really do think with my pen, because my head often knows nothing about what my hand is writing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#31. Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

Niall Williams

#32. I have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one.

George Sand

#33. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#34. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

China Mieville

#35. We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

Teresa Mummert

#36. The primary thing I should do, apart from being a good husband, brother, son, and friend, is to be a citizen activist. But I'm afraid it takes away from the writing. Not that anything depends on whether I put an essay in 'The Nation' or not. But you want to participate.

Tony Kushner

#37. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

Mark Slouka

#38. Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

Anne Enright

#39. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

#40. Bon Jovi is most definitely the key to how I am able to write so much in a day

C.S. Woolley

#41. Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.

Steve Martin

#42. For a young and presumptuous poet a disposition to write satires is one of the most dangerous he can encourage. It tempts him to personalities, which are not always forgiven after he has repented and become ashamed of them.

Robert Southey

#43. Writing a song doesn't heal things. Even if the song comes up with a solution, it's still only a theory. Going out and living my lyrics is a whole other deal. That takes courage.

Alanis Morissette

#44. I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

Todd Barry

#45. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.

Andre Maurois

#46. 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

#47. Creativity is divine.

A.D. Posey

#48. Writing a song is actually quite easy. Writing a good one is very, very difficult.

Joe Elliott

#49. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.

Christy Hall

#50. There is a heavy price to pay for writing a bad book.

Tony Burgess

#51. I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.

Robert Rankin

#52. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.

Henry Miller

#53. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!

Mary Gordon

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.

Stephen L. Carter

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

Criss Jami

#60. No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn't sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours' writing. Nothing.

J.K. Rowling

#61. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#62. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

Caroline Kennedy

#63. So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice.

John Eldredge

#64. 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

#65. I'm totally active. I am just this side of hyper. I jog and go to the gym every day. When I'm on the computer, I'm reading, I'm writing, I'm never quiet. My brain is very rarely not engaged. Every now and again I will fall asleep under the parasol in the sun, but that's a rarity.

Suzi Quatro

#66. 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

#67. Truth is often better seized and louder in the silence of the written word.

Ina Catrinescu

#68. 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

#69. Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.

Criss Jami

#70. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.

John Irving

#71. Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen.

Peter Drucker

#72. Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.

Flann O'Brien

#73. I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Tom Stoppard

#74. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.

Philip Larkin

#75. To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#76. [I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

Betsy Lerner

#77. Writing songs and looking for ideas is like blinking my eyes. It's an involuntary muscle. I do it without thought.

Toby Keith

#78. No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered.

Stephen Greenblatt

#79. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.

Paul Raymond Martin

#80. Writing songs is cheaper than going to therapy.

Brent Smith

#81. Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.

Robert Bringhurst

#82. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain

#83. People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.

Jesse Kellerman

#84. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Anthony Doerr

#85. 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

#86. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.

John Scalzi

#87. Writing is a form of licensed madness.

Mal Peet

#88. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.

F.K. Preston

#89. I've realized the most effective way to write, for me, is knowing what to throw away.

Youth Lagoon

#90. The best way to be original is to not copy anyone.

Sebastyne Young

#91. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.

Christy Hall

#92. If you submit an
article to a major refereed clinical journal and it is accepted
upon first submission without a single revision, let me
know and I will take you to dinner the next time you are in
Portland, Oregon.

Robert B. Taylor

#93. 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

#94. Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.

Maya Lin

#95. Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.

Kate Mosse

#96. Read widely, not in order to copy someone else's style, but to learn to appreciate and recognize good writing and to see how the best writers have achieved their result. Poor writing is, unfortunately, infectious and should be avoided.

P.D. James

#97. I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

George Orwell

#98. Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

Bret Easton Ellis

#99. I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.

Lauren Oliver

#100. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Madeleine L'Engle