Top 100 Writing Less Quotes
#1. So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!
Tracy Chevalier
#2. Springsteen on that record started writing less about having your wind in your hair and turning the radio up and more about being dragged down by adult things. Regular people trying to get ahead. A little less mythical and romantic, and more real. It's a really spectacular record for that reason.
Craig Finn
#3. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#4. Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
#5. When you teach, it's sometimes necessary to consciously not write for a month or two - and then pick a time in the future to sink back in. It makes you less frustrated and more in control. I do best when I give myself breaks and come back hungry.
Tom Barbash
#6. Either way, you wrote the book and now you're complaining about the reviews I'm giving it," I quipped.
"Fair enough." He held up his hands, "I'm going to start writing the sequel which will be considerably less narcissistic. Will you read it?"
"Only if every other girl on campus hasn't.
Tarryn Fisher
#7. I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
Lynne Reid Banks
#10. Set fire to cities and nations, to hearts and minds, to the very core of every human spirit. Make sure your words seep into the skin of the reader, leaving trace minerals that sustain the ailing human shell. Make them pay attention. Set fire to the soul. Anything less is an abomination to creation.
Susan Marie
#11. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#12. 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
#13. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#14. Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
Jane Lindskold
#15. I ended up at fifty, over-the-hill, thinking I had no future. Finally, I realized that I had allowed myself to write less than I could ... As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we're good, we'll always be in trouble. Let's be sure we deserve it.
Waldo Salt
#16. I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.
Orhan Pamuk
#17. Of the small number of things which I have liked and done well, drinking is by far the thing I have done best. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk more. I have written much less than most people who write; but I have drunk more than the majority of the people who drink.
Guy Debord
#18. To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.
William Gibson
#19. The more practice you have, the less stressful writing is.
Edwidge Danticat
#20. I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.
Jonathan Lethem
#21. Think 'Game of Thrones.' In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.
Douglas Rushkoff
#22. There's the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but there's less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job.
Dan Harmon
#23. I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.
Mike White
#24. The less I talk in bars, write emails, express myself in an emotionally lewd way outside of my songwriting, the more I have to do it through my music.
Ben Folds
#25. Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.
Christopher McQuarrie
#26. I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.
Vikram Seth
#27. I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to.
Thomas Merton
#28. Is a twist less satisfying if you know it's coming? Is a twist that you can't predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.
Gabrielle Zevin
#29. I know a lot of writers who would much rather be writing the Great American Novel, but they've got bills to pay and alimony, and so they take a job at a less-than-reputable paper. You know, you do what you gotta do.
Eric Stoltz
#30. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
Annie Dillard
#31. The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing.
John N. Gray
#32. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,
Francis A. Schaeffer
#33. 'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.
Melissa Bank
#34. Portland in particular is a cheap enough place to live that you can still develop your passion - painting, writing, music. People seem less status-conscious. Even wealthy people buy second-hand clothes and look a little bit homeless.
Chuck Palahniuk
#35. No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.
Carl Hiaasen
#36. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.
Helen Oyeyemi
#37. When writing becomes too dominant, it gets leached of its own power. We spend more and more time writing, and we have less and less to write about.
Julia Cameron
#38. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise - except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.
William Maxwell
#39. I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
Alan Bennett
#40. I tried to appear more normal than I was, so that those around me wouldn't think I was less normal than I was, and that suited them just fine.
Elizaveta Mikhailichenko
#41. A piece of writing is never good," he told me. "There is simply a moment when it is less bad than before.
Joel Dicker
#42. That's good. You see, boxing and writing are very similar. You get in the guard position, you decide to throw yourself into battle, you lift your fists, and you hurl yourself at your opponent. A book is more or less the same. A book is a battle.
Joel Dicker
#43. I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
Ernest Hemingway,
#44. A writer who intermingles his own opinions with that of his characters is less consequent than a fascistic communist.
Kevin Focke
#45. Don't wish the world demanded less of you. Rise up and exceed its standards.
A.D. Posey
#46. There's less skill and more plain hard work to writing than anyone except a writer thinks.
Mabel Seeley
#47. I could not personally care less about whether JT Leroy turns out to be fictional or not. I find fictional people writing fiction no more or less objectionable than real people writing fiction, because it's fiction,
John Scalzi
#48. I think the girls are attracted to me because they can relate to me. The girls are nice when you're in my situation, but since I'm in here [in jail] I spend more time writing to them about the relationship, rather than living it, but there are good friendships formed never-the-less.
Richard Ramirez
#49. The more I write, the less I understand why.
Marty Rubin
#50. I found the writing arena to be much less competitive.
Phil Hartman
#51. For me, every book is a journey - questioning a really difficult topic that most people don't want to talk about, much less write about. And that's what I need; that works for me as a writer.
Jodi Picoult
#52. Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
M. John Harrison
#53. You spend all this time inside, alone, writing. And then it becomes about travel and new places and new people. And I do love talking to people about the book, but ideally, I like a little less disruptive lifestyle, I like it when things are more organized.
Garance Dore
#54. Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
Marilynne Robinson
#55. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
Paul Theroux
#56. I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
Jess Walter
#57. Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.
Robert Hass
#58. Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.
Arthur M. Jolly
#59. Young people today have lots of experience ... interacting with new technologies, but a lot less so of creating [or] expressing themselves with new technologies. It's almost as if they can read but not write.
Mitchel Resnick
#60. The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.
Pico Iyer
#61. Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.
Padgett Powell
#62. There's surprisingly little difference between writing from a male angle and from a female angle, but I feel more restricted in my language when I'm writing as a male character because males tend to sound less emotionally expressive than females.
Anne Tyler
#63. I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.
Jonathan Carroll
#64. I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn't writing as much and I didn't miss it.
Helen Slater
#65. Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you'll end up with less of either.
Don Roff
#66. He who writes must master the rules of grammar. He who shoots photographs needs only to follow the instructions as given by the camera ... This leads to the paradox that the more people shoot photographs, the less they are capable of deciphering them.
Vilem Flusser
#67. Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one's really gotten one's imaginative passport stamped.
Andrew Lazo
#68. The less a writer discusses his work and himself the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care.
Jack Vance
#69. If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.
Giovanni Ribisi
#70. I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.
Mohsin Hamid
#71. When a writer is already stretching the bounds of reality by writing within a science fiction or fantasy setting, that writer must realize that excessive coincidence makes the fictional reality the writer is creating less 'real.'
Jane Lindskold
#73. Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#74. I hate writing. I will do anything to avoid it. The only way I could write less was if I was dead.
Fran Lebowitz
#75. I find writing the darker side, writing tragedy, a lot easier than writing happiness. Happiness is just less psychologically compelling, isn't it?
Paula Hawkins
#76. Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.
Bill Bryson
#77. You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.
Jennifer Donnelly
#78. I write because the act of writing itself is what drives me. It's a private communication within myself - nothing more or less. This doesn't mean I do not want to share with people.
Michael Hersch
#79. There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Erica Jong
#80. I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.
Rebecca Solnit
#81. Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.
Scott Adams
#82. The life of a writer is tragic: the more we advance, the farther there is to go and the more there is to say, the less time there is to say it.
Gabrielle Roy
#83. Writing about the future and the past is less a way of dramatizing change than of showing, by way of contrast, what abides.
Walter Kirn
#84. One page a day, seven a week, thirty or thirty-one to the month. Fishing in his pocket for a tip, he came up with his pen, a thick black fountain pen. Fountain: it seemed less flowing, less forthcoming than that, in shape more like a bullet or a bomb. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
#85. When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.
Paul Theroux
#86. Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
Sarah Waters
#87. The writing is the most important bit, and performing it is just closing the circle because I'm less likely to screw it up than anyone else.
John Cleese
#88. There is something terribly radical about believing that one's own experience and images are important enough to speak about, much less to write about and to perform
James A. Baldwin
#89. I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it.
Ansel Adams
#90. I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.
Anna Quindlen
#91. Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.
Of course those who write short books have even less to say.
Mark Z. Danielewski
#92. Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
Kate Atkinson
#93. Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.
Robert Frost
#94. The Polar Express was the easiest of my picture book manuscripts to write ... Once I realized the train was going to the North Pole, finding the story seemed less like a creative effort than an act of recollection. I felt, like the storys narrator, that I was remembering something, not making it up.
Chris Van Allsburg
#95. Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
David Knopfler
#96. Give all that you can.
No more. No less.
Every. Single. Day.
Christy Hall
#97. What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.
Allison K. Williams
#98. The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.
Mike Carey
#99. I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,' Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was.
Kate Atkinson
#100. Writing is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you'll be about what's going to happen to it, where it's going, what it sounds like, whether it's right.
Wayne Dyer
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