Top 100 Writing Of Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.
John Gardner
#4. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#5. When I sit down in front of a Windows machine, I can't write; when I sit down in front of my Mac, I can write. So I only use Macs.
Michael Crichton
#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. 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
#8. (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. We all gotta die, and we all gotta live with the things our dark sides do. People are afraid of their darkness, though. Spend their whole lives so scared of dyin' that they never get to live. Spend their whole lives pushin' down that darkness, until there ain't no light at all.
Suzanne Palmieri
#11. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
#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. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
Stephen King
#17. He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.
Galt Niederhoffer
#18. I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
William, Saroyan
#20. If you want to give the devil a message, write it on the bottom of your shoes.
Andrew Wommack
#21. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.
Gita V. Reddy
#22. Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.
Sting
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. There always had to be a survivor. Maybe this simply spoke to the optimism of the men writing those screenplays; even with an uncomfortable sci fi plot they had to subconsciously comfort themselves by thinking that at least a hundred people would survive.
Someone has to survive
Chris Dietzel
#26. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#28. I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column.
George Vecsey
#29. 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
#30. I'm also always thinking about the score as a recording, as opposed to a performance that can be recreated in a live environment. Some of what I write could of course be played in a concert hall, but for the needs of a film I don't consider that.
Geoff Zanelli
#31. Being more aware will enable you to have only astonishing impressions, avoiding any of the disappointing experiences like some of those we went through.
Sahara Sanders
#32. I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it.
Christopher Owens
#33. 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
#34. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#35. If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Russell Banks
#36. 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
#37. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Christina Perri
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.
John Wayne
#42. Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
#43. I started to write a series of fantasy novels when I was eleven. I have never taken anything artistic as seriously; since then, writing has felt like an attempt to get back there, to my bedroom, my maps, those races and languages and runes.
Ken Baumann
#44. There are so many ready to write (poor fools!) for the honor and glory of the thing, and there are so many ready to take advantage of this fact, and withhold from needy talent the moral right to a deserved remuneration.
Fanny Fern
#45. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#46. If you're writing a screenplay for a feature, you don't have any involvement with the casting process, the editing process, the set design, the costume design, or any of that stuff.
David Benioff
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
Paul Auster
#50. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
#51. 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
#52. Often turn the stile [correct with care], if you expect to write anything worthy of being read twice.
[Lat., Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint Scripturus.]
Horace
#53. I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
#54. And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
Bernard Cornwell
#55. I like writing songs. I like the camarderie of the and. I like touring. I love playing bass. And then there's free beer.
Keanu Reeves
#56. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#57. Writing for the love of writing. My muse makes no apologies under this pen name. ;)
Amanda Wylde
#58. 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
#59. I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work.
Wilbur Smith
#60. 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
#61. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
Andrea Seigel
#62. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.
Neale Donald Walsch
#63. I've been writing a lot of country music again. I've written some bluegrass material. I'm having a good time doing that.
Dan Fogelberg
#64. I've never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.
James Frey
#65. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
Teresa Palmer
#66. I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.
Daniel Handler
#67. I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.
Octavia Butler
#68. There are two kinds of typical days. There's the typical day when I'm writing a novel, and there's the typical day when I'm not.
Paul Auster
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.
Bauvard
#72. 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
#73. In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
Peter Temple
#74. All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
Fran Lebowitz
#75. Instead of noting down things I'm unlikely to forget, I will write a poem. Even if I have never written one before and even if I never do so again, I will at least know that I once had the courage to put my feelings into words.
Paulo Coelho
#76. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.
Criss Jami
#77. 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
#78. In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
Rose Tremain
#79. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.
Patti Smith
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Spend sunny afternoons writing. Take weekends in the country. Dream. Drink good wine, eat fabulous cheese and great bread. Make the kind of love that destroys the bed.
Rachel Hauck
#84. 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
#85. I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.
Seamus Heaney
#86. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.
Chila Woychik
#87. I like writing for other people. I love it. It's great because you write it and then you hand it off to someone else. But in terms of directing, anything I direct will be something I've written or re-written. I'm in no crazy rush to direct.
Nicholas Stoller
#88. Truth is often better seized and louder in the silence of the written word.
Ina Catrinescu
#89. Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.
Criss Jami
#90. 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
#91. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#92. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
#93. The thrill of seeing my words on a printed page has never faded. Now I've found my niche, my passion. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life.
Marion Smith Collins
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I think my writing was certainly shaped from having lived in a place like Niverville as well as by the family that I came from, the religion that I had, that type of thing.
David Bergen
#98. I have chosen to parody the writing styles of Carlos Castaneda, James Redfield, Richard Bach, Lynn Andrews, and several other best-selling new age authors.
Frederick Lenz
#99. Even the wolf gets anxious, but the wolf keeps moving and doing, all while being washed in the magic of moonlight
Jason E. Hodges
#100. Writing is not about ideas, it is about the expression of ideas - a written expression.
Paul Raymond Martin
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