Writing Long Quotes

#1. Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

Lucas Neff

#2. But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

Daniel Woodrell

#3. Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

Matthew Stewart

#4. I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

#5. I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

Geoff Johns

#6. You leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that don't belong to me, some day they'll find out i did it and take my library card away.

Helene Hanff

#7. Here I've been telling him things in my head for weeks, writing long, frenzied missives to him I know I'll never send, and now that I have him less than two feet away, I'm struck dumb.
Fantastic.

Jody Gehrman

#8. Writing long hand is the last refuge. One needs the time it takes to put pencil to paper and let it run along the ruled line.

Antonio Damasio

#9. Somebody told me I should try writing. Actually, a lot of people tried to get me to try writing, long before I thought I was 'the writing type'.

Karen Walton

#10. My father was highbrow: writing long biographies of Dante and stuff like that. Ghostwriting sportsman memoirs? That was sort of the lowest of the low.

David Lagercrantz

#11. I'm 68 years old, and somebody asked if I'm retired. I told him, No, I'll still be writing long after I'm dead.

Ron Brackin

#12. There is no way to stop. Writers go on writing long after it becomes financially unnecessary ... because it hurts less to write than it does not to write.

Robert A. Heinlein

#13. Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Jorge Luis Borges

#14. This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.

C.S. Lewis

#15. Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one's thoughts

Nick Bantock

#16. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.

Wanda Lea Brayton

#17. 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

#18. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Robert Galbraith

#19. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Which meant that life did not feel like work.

Neil Gaiman

#20. I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.

Rick Riordan

#21. For such a long time, when you're a writer, you really are just writing for yourself, and maybe a few friends. So it's really amazing when your book gets out there and more people are reading and responding to it. It really makes the world of the books feel real.

Cassandra Clare

#22. I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

Ravi Shankar

#23. That kiss was amazing; it had all the passion and longing we had been holding onto for so long. That is when the dam finally broke for me and I started crying. I knew right then that Hunter was the only one I wanted. He was my happily ever after.

Megan Smith

#24. When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

Roddy Doyle

#25. Writing songs is not something I wanted to share with people for a long time. It was precious to me. I didn't want someone to crush it. I waited until I felt strong enough to take the criticism.

Ray Lamontagne

#26. Life's like a book: What matters is the hook.
Be it short or long, just live it strong.
Whether it's five stars, or how near or far, just soar!

Ana Claudia Antunes

#27. I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.

Justin Theroux

#28. I'm a better writer now because I've worked very hard at getting better. My long-range goal will always be to write better books.

George Pelecanos

#29. I'll never retire as long as I live - that's like retiring from life! I'll never stop writing, teaching, lecturing. If you're in good health, living is exciting on its own.

Bel Kaufman

#30. I've been writing music since I was 9. I took harmony and counterpoint classes when I was studying the clarinet. So, I've been writing for an awfully long time. It just became part of everyday life.

Howard Shore

#31. I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.

Sonya Hartnett

#32. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill.
If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
- Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
The Silkworm

J.K. Rowling

#33. One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

Justin Cronin

#34. People try to be more edgy, or write about that first explosive meeting between two people in a club, but not so much the long-term issues; I don't know how to write a song about teenage heartbreak anymore.

Joe Goddard

#35. 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

#36. I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.

Virgil Thomson

#37. I'm not Akira Kurosawa. He used to write ... He used to write a completely new spec script over a couple of nights. I'm not like that. It takes me a long time to put a film together that I want to make.

Duncan Jones

#38. Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

Graham Greene

#39. But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy

#40. You can be the greatest at stringing words together but if you don't mean what you say your words will not live long in this world.

Jason E. Hodges

#41. You think you have no 'talent'? Write anyway. lots of people with 'talent' don't actually act on it. As long as you write, you will learn, you will improve, and you will be better than anyone claiming to have 'talent.

M. Kirin

#42. Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

Roman Payne

#43. It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

William Faulkner

#44. A cop told me, a long time ago, that there's no substitute for knowing what you're doing. Most of us scribblers do not. The ones that're any good are aware of this. The rest write silly stuff. The trouble is this: The readers know it.

George V. Higgins

#45. I actually think there are more Republicans than people realize who would be sympathetic to immigration reform in the rank and file. I think the lesson for Jeb Bush is politicians shouldn't write books with long lead times.

E. J. Dionne

#46. After writing fiction for so long, I like the discovery element of nonfiction, in the sense that when you find the right information, it feels like gold.

Edwidge Danticat

#47. At Ucross I learned that I am capable of focusing deeply for long periods of time. I love to write. I don't think I would have said that before this trip.

Edan Lepucki

#48. Passonate, irreverent, utterly relevant, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk offers an unforgettable portrait of a reluctant hero. Ben Fountain writes like a man inspired and his razor sharp exploration of our contemporary ironies will break your heart.

Margot Livesey

#49. When I finished [writing it], I was crying. I knew at long last, after ten years of trying, I had written something good.

Ray Bradbury

#50. Style comes only have long, hard practice and writing.

William Styron

#51. I have to be by myself when I write, and I never know how long it will take. It is like making butter. Sometimes it will come in a few minutes, and sometimes I have to churn away for hours.

Annie Fellows Johnston

#52. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.

Cristian Mihai

#53. I was a poet. I had no expectations other than creating a world of art with words that would live on long after I was gone.

Jason E. Hodges

#54. There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.

Terry Pratchett

#55. Those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

Sofia Samatar

#56. but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death.

Elliot Mabeuse

#57. I came to accept in myself a long time ago that I really do like writing articulate sociopaths.

Matt Nix

#58. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

Stephen King

#59. If you think about how long it takes to write a piece of music for an orchestra, it's outrageous to me, outrageous.

Gail Zappa

#60. I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.

Eugene Delacroix

#61. It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.

Yuriy Tarnawsky

#62. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.

A.J. Flowers

#63. A new novel awaits my arrival, prepares for my careful inspection. Yet a novel is always a long dream that lives in me for years before I know where to go to hunt it out.

Pat Conroy

#64. Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it...

M. Scott Momaday

#65. Writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.

Ann Patchett

#66. Never so long as you live, write a letter to a man - no matter who he is - that you would be ashamed to see in a newspaper above your signature.

Emily Post

#67. If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that ... but I have published slightly too much recently.

A. N. Wilson

#68. 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

#69. I hope to keep writing journalism as long as I write fiction; it's afforded me such amazing adventures and opportunities. It does take a lot of time, so it's hard to do both at once, but I try to do a big journalism piece every couple of years, and I'll hopefully continue with that.

Jennifer Egan

#70. The shriek cut thinly though the drizzling dimness, holding for a long moment. At last it broadened and dropped to the old.

Natalie Babbitt

#71. I've been writing 'Green Lantern' for a long time, and one of the reasons I've enjoyed it is because the depth of stories you can tell is pretty endless with space and everything.

Geoff Johns

#72. I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book.

Groucho Marx

#73. I've been used for writing rhythm guitar chords for a long time because it's so easy to play and chords just sound good on it.

Bradford Cox

#74. All the youth now in England of free men, who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it, be set to learn as long as they are not fit for any other occupation, until they are able to read English writing well.

Alfred The Great

#75. If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Alice Walker

#76. Writing an essay is like a school assignment: I have my topic, I organize my thoughts, and I write it. I have complete control over what I'm doing. Writing a novel is like setting out on a journey without knowing who or what I'll encounter, how long it's going to take, or where I'm going to end up.

Tawni O'Dell

#77. The imagination needs moodling,
long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

Brenda Ueland

#78. I have been fighting writing songs for a long time. People keep telling me I should write, and other writers have offered to write with me, and to be honest, it's not something I've ever really had a passion for - plus I wasn't sure I had the talent to do it!

Martina Mcbride

#79. If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.

Charles Stross

#80. I feel with this film that as long as we tell Philomena's story and as long as we're true to her, which Jeff and Steve have already done by writing the story ... we must not sell her short;. She's a most remarkable woman and all my concern was that we must be absolutely true to her story.

Judi Dench

#81. There are, indeed, few kinds of composition from which an author, however learned or ingenious, can hope a long continuance of fame.

Samuel Johnson

#82. What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.

Kevin Brockmeier

#83. It's so easy to use tired, shopworn figures of speech. I love using long, fancy words but have learned - mostly from writing my biography of Winston Churchill - that short, strong words work better. I am ever-vigilant against the passive and against jargon, both of which are so insidious.

Gretchen Rubin

#84. I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

Linda Sue Park

#85. The books people are writing today, they're too long. You get a little bit of plot, and then pages and pages of Creative Writing. They teach classes in how to do this. They should teach classes in how to stop!

Douglas Adams

#86. Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

Ben Yagoda

#87. Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.

Norman Macleod

#88. A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#89. At one point I had a very complicated plan to use the game of chess as a generating structure for writing. I prepared for a long time. I finally wrote two chapters and stopped. It was too complicated and too difficult to write. And who would've read it?

Dumitru Tepeneag

#90. It is my contention that a really great novel is made with a knife and not a pen. A novelist must have the intestinal fortitude to cut out even the most brilliant passage so long as it doesn't advance the story.

Frank Yerby

#91. [I]n the long run it's worthwhile to see the manuscript as a text capable of improvement.

Barbara Sjoholm

#92. If you have all the research, all the ground rules, all the directives, all the data - it doesn't mean the ad is written. Then you've got to close the door and write something - that is the moment of truth which we all try to postpone as long as possible.

David Ogilvy

#93. Music is my passion so I feel like I'll be doing this for a long time and God forbid if anything happens I'll still write music. So, I could write music for other people. I see myself making music for a very long time.

Justin Bieber

#94. Mainly I've been back to my books and writings and being nice and quiet and lazy. As I'm writing this, the radio says there's a foot of snow falling on Long Island. I really love snow and wish I could take a long walk in it right now.

Jack Kerouac

#95. After I started publishing poetry I got to teach creative writing. Eventually I was promoted and even got tenure. But then I felt compelled to drop everything and move. But I've been teaching for a long time. More than four decades.

Joan Larkin

#96. I've been writing, in one way or another, for as long as I can remember.

Sarah Dessen

#97. I long for the day I no longer long for him.

Franki Fiori

#98. I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Richard Russo

#99. Lonnie says it doesn't take long to write a song if you're stricken with a severe case of the Tennysons. He wasn't necessarily talking about a chart-climber.

Dan Jenkins

#100. If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

Shelly King