Top 100 Writing Is Thinking Quotes
#3. ... if you can't be happy then be quiet!" frm "Silent Joe," by T Jefferson Parker." Silence is another form of lying." frm "Attachment," by me. Take your pick ... words, "writing freezes speech," Chris Hedges. "Writing is thinking," me.
Mark Jabbour
#4. Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.
Lewis Black
#5. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
David McCullough
#6. You can't learn to play the piano without playing the piano, you can't learn to write without writing, and, in many ways, you can't learn to think without thinking. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
David McCullough
#8. Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.
William Zinsser
#9. I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#10. 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
#11. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.
Criss Jami
#12. Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
Maya Lin
#13. To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.
Steven Pressfield
#14. We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.
Garrison Keillor
#15. I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.
R. YS Perez
#16. I think that the joy of writing a novel is the self-exploratio n that emerges and also that wonderful feeling of playing God with the characters. When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish ... I think the most important thing for a writer is to be locked in a study.
Erica Jong
#17. I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Toni Morrison
#18. Writing, for me, is the best occupation I can think of, and there is nothing in the world I would rather do.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
#19. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#20. I think the business of writing a great deal of it is the business of paying attention to your characters, to the world they live in, to the story you have to tell, but just a kind of deep attention and out of that if you pay attention properly the story will tell you what it needs.
Salman Rushdie
#21. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#22. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#23. Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.
Arthur Brisbane
#24. In my case, if I start out by thinking about the plot, things don't go well. Small points, such as my impression of what is likely to occur, do come to mind, but I let the rest of the story take its own course. I don't want to spend as long as two years writing a story whose plot I already know.
Haruki Murakami
#25. 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
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.
Leslie Jamison
#31. 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
#32. Thinking is creating with God, as thinking is writing with the ready writer; and worlds are only leaves turned over in the process of composition, about his throne.
Henry Ward Beecher
#33. 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
#34. One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.
Bell Hooks
#35. Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.
Gail Godwin
#36. If you can't challenge your own way of thinking, then you can't write various perspectives. The real world rarely agrees, which is also true in fiction.
G.P. Burdon
#37. Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Dan Alatorre
#38. Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.
Joan Didion
#39. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a writer is to follow your initial [writing] plan too stringently. A story needs room to grow and evolve.
Patrick Rothfuss
#40. There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn't one.
Scott Berkun
#41. Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian.
Gregory McDonald
#42. I am very present in my work and my work is somehow an expression of my soul, but at the same time I think that a writer cannot write out of nothing.
Paulo Coelho
#43. I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times.
Flannery O'Connor
#44. Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm ... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.
Freeman Dyson
#45. I think one of the dullest things in the world is a letter filled with apologies for not writing sooner.
Dorothy Wordsworth
#46. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#47. Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.
Rebecca Skloot
#48. I am always thinking about writing music; my wife is constantly asking me: 'Is there any way you can turn off the music part of your brain for a minute?' but I really can't! It's my form of therapy.
Kellin Quinn
#49. Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
Leslie Lamport
#50. When you have that first flash of what you think is going to be a great idea-from the mouth, from the hands-that's an amazing feeling. I don't think anything's quite as good as that.
Daryl Hall
#52. Hen, there's such a temptation to just constantly write things that are going to make the fans happy. Sometimes it takes a little bit of unhappiness to make those happy pay-offs work better. That's something that is fascinating to us and I think has really changed the way that stories are told.
Jeff Pinkner
#53. I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work of writing fiction.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#54. Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.
Albert Einstein
#55. I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards.
Phil Collins
#56. I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.
Tamora Pierce
#57. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#58. It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
Karen Russell
#59. I think the only person a writer has an obligation to is himself. If what I write doesn't fulfill something in me, if I don't honestly feel it's the best I can do, then I'm miserable.
Truman Capote
#60. I think all writing about art is in some way dancing to architecture. It's all about similitude, being analogous, metaphorical, adjectival, etc.
Rob Chapman
#61. I think my one of my strengths in standup is my ability to adlib. I do all my best writing on stage. I can sit down and write jokes, but I'd rather go on stage with a premise or an idea and let the jokes come that way. My creative juices are never flowing any better than when I'm onstage.
Henry Cho
#62. I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.
Shirley Hazzard
#63. Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.
Samuel Johnson
#64. For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
Wallace Shawn
#65. Writing is like pulling your hair out. You have nothing, and you can't think of anything, but you have to think of something.
Charlie Day
#66. And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.
Stephenie Meyer
#67. There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.
Maxim Gorky
#68. The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
John Adams
#69. I think alcohol is a good drug for me when I'm writing. I don't think I've ever had a problem with it. I can stop for a few weeks, so I think it's okay. I don't think it's good for my liver, but I do love it. It's a huge part of my life, and it makes me happy.
Ben Folds
#70. As a camera is an instrument that teaches us how to see when we don't have a camera, writing is a process that teaches how to think when we are not writing.
Ted Agon
#71. All I know is when I start getting serious about songwriting ... it's like a playground. All responsibilities slip away and you're with your essence. There can be delight there and self-discovery. You can dance there ... I think of it as my serious playground.
Laura Nyro
#72. The reason why people think of programming as being hard is because you're writing down a general rule which is going to be used for lots of instances that a particular instance must process correctly.
Gerald Jay Sussman
#73. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
Kevin Hart
#74. It's part of the business of really not caring about topping myself because I really don't care what's going to happen. I think just surviving is a major thing. I'd like to write something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers would find a source of respect.
Rod Serling
#75. If you're going to write, write one poem all your life, let nobody read it, and then burn it. This is very young thinking, I confess, but it is the seminal part of my life.
Jack Nicholson
#76. Writing is really a way of thinking
not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.
Toni Morrison
#77. Not that I don't think irreverent humor and someone being filthy is funny, I just do what I do. Any comedian would admit throwing an f-bomb in there would help get a reaction ... I'm not on a Puritanical pursuit, but when I would curse in a joke, I believe I'm not done writing it.
Jim Gaffigan
#78. I think anyone who has had a fight and who's a very good observer of the situation and people's behavior is capable of writing a fight. But you do start thinking about writing during the fights that you have with your partner.
Julie Delpy
#79. I don't think the written word is important in movies anymore and the really great movies are done by great directors who in many cases write their own scripts. I think it's gotten to be more of a visual thing than an audible thing.
Anita Loos
#80. I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me.
Augusten Burroughs
#81. I think one of the best things you can do is write really sad songs that touch some semblance of ... I guess 'hope' is the right word?
Eric Bachmann
#82. Whatever the style is, I want to have a sense that the writer is thinking, and really trying to get at something, and that there's a sense of discovery as the writing goes along.
Lynne Tillman
#83. Modern music is people who can't think signing artists who can't write songs to make records for people who can't hear.
Frank Zappa
#84. I don't think in time signatures, and when I do, what I write is generally 3/4 or 4/4, the most basic, straightforward stuff. I think that comes from just not being a super-schooled musician.
Blake Judd
#85. I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind; the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
Rebecca West
#86. I think one artist to another artist, the best compliment you can pay one another, because the part of you that is inspired or creates something, to write a joke or a song, that's like the God-like part of a person.
Dave Chappelle
#87. I felt like you can write forever, but you have a short time to raise a family. And I think a family is a lot more important than writing.
Ken Kesey
#88. People put off writing thinking they don't have the time or enough of an opinion to matter and that is crap. You are the only one standing in your own way, so get started.
C.C. Chapman
#90. It takes so long to write a script, thinking to yourself, "Am I wasting my time? Am I putting everything into this thing that maybe just won't ever exist?" I always think, God, acting is so much easier. At least for acting you have the source material already.
Jason Schwartzman
#91. Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can't possibly write a line you do it anyhow.
Henry Denker
#92. I think that writing and publishing are different. I think I will always write; I might not always publish. The idea of not publishing is wonderful!
Kate Zambreno
#93. I think the biggest challenge I have faced is that I have struggled most of my life with often crippling depression which has sometimes if not keeping me off stage kept me from writing regularly and with any kind of confidence.
Gary Gulman
#94. Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.
Ethan Canin
#95. Writing to corroborate what you already think is the essence of bad writing.
Victor LaValle
#96. I think writing is really a process of communication ... It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.
Sherley Anne Williams
#97. I'm not so naive that I didn't know or didn't suspect that, at some point, someone was going to say "You're writing about the occult." My wizarding world is a world of imagination. I think it is a moral world.
J.K. Rowling
#98. I don't think screenplay writing is the same as writing - I mean, I think it's blueprinting.
Robert Altman
#99. Try to think of writing as a gift - more complexly put: it is the curse and the cure.
Julianna Baggott
#100. I don't really pursue writing songs for other people. I guess one of the things I always think about is a good line in a song should be something I can hear myself saying.
Craig Finn
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