Top 100 Writing P Quotes
#1. When I wrote and got out of the way, writing did writing. (p.90)
Natalie Goldberg
#2. The mystery of writing advertisements consists mainly in saying in a few plain words exactly what it is desired to say, precisely as it would be written in a letter or told to an acquaintance.
George P. Rowell
#3. During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.
H.P. Oliver
#4. Writing is more than a craft; it is a way of life. Everything you see or do becomes part of what you write.
H.P. Oliver
#5. The voice in my head has a stutter, and that's really annoying. D-D-D-Dave Dave. What? K-K-K-Kill your p-p-p-parents. L-L-L-Loa ... Write it down!
Dave Attell
#6. Other people get into occupations by accident or design; but writers are born. I could work at selling motels, or slopping hogs, for fifty years, but if someone asked my occupation, I'd say writer, even if I'd never sold a word. Writers write. Other people talk.
W.P. Kinsella
#7. Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.
Richard P. Feynman
#8. When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.
A.J.P. Taylor
#9. Writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.
P.G. Wodehouse
#10. I like writing for children because they are not prejudiced against magic.
J.P. Hightman
#12. If you have one strong idea, you can't help repeating it and embroidering it. Sometimes I think that authors should write one novel and then be put in a gas chamber.
John P. Marquand
#13. P.S. If you do not receive this, of course it must have been miscarried; therefore I beg you to write and let me know.
Boyle Roche
#14. I'm up at 8:30 every morning, and I write from about 9:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. - with some breaks, of course. I really try to see writing as a career that I turn off when my husband comes home from work. Otherwise, writing could very easily become all-consuming.
Sarah Mlynowski
#15. Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales." p. 26
Stanley Fish
#16. I only hold the pen while my mind does the writing
P.J. Bayliss
#17. [A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
#18. The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.
J.P. Donleavy
#19. From the reader's point of view, punctuation provides a map for one who must otherwise drive blindly past the by-ways, intersections, and detours of a writer's thought.
Mina P. Shaughnessy
#20. Men write great romance because they have more at stake
P.J. Bayliss
#21. Writing my books I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life.
P.G. Wodehouse
#22. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H.P. Lovecraft
#23. All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.
P.D. James
#24. I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching.
Thomas P. Campbell
#25. She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.
P.G. Wodehouse
#26. Don't just plan to write - write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.
P.D. James
#27. I always strive to create a setting that leaves the readers' imagination room to roam. That way, every reader sees the story through their own eyes.
P.S. Bartlett
#28. I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.
P.L. Travers
#29. In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.
H.P. Lovecraft
#30. He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry.
P.G. Wodehouse
#31. Writing this book required an enormous amount of help from friends. To them goes the credit. I'll take the money.
P. J. O'Rourke
#32. I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider'd but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg'd in with infrequency and Discrimination.
H.P. Lovecraft
#33. For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.
A.P. Herbert
#34. Writing: Turning one's worst moments into profit.
J.P. Donleavy
#35. Everything I did was pure love. Pure love. And if you live that way, you've had a great life. - 'Ray Bradbury: the last interview and other conversations' by Sam Weller (p.92)
Ray Bradbury
#36. We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words
and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)
Thomas Newkirk
#37. Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.
W.P. Kinsella
#38. I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.
P.J. Harvey
#39. I don't know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I'm telling a story is this dashed difficult problem of where to begin it.
P.G. Wodehouse
#40. At night on land migrating monarchs slumber on certain trees, hung in festoons with wings folded together, thick on the trees and shaggy as bearskin. [p. 244]
Annie Dillard
#41. The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world.
P. J. O'Rourke
#42. It is, of course, not only impossible for readers to know the intention of most, if not all, writers, but an author himself may think he is writing one thing while he is in fact writing something quite different.
Russell M. Goldfarb
#43. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.
P.G. Wodehouse
#44. My father was a musician, and I've always loved writing. I grew up in New York City during a time when hip hop music was surrounding you with the hip hop culture, and it felt natural. I was a really huge fan of the music.
El-P
#45. Remember that the animals and plants have no M.P. they can write to; they can't perform sit-down strikes or, indeed, strikes of any sort; they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it.
Gerald Durrell
#46. No. Seriously. Speak American and not this ancient and very fucked-up, confusing olden-day Euro crap. Without the confusing woo-woo refrences, explain why the hell you're writing Zoey off.
P.C. Cast
#47. The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
Richard P. Denney
#48. From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.
P.G. Wodehouse
#49. P.S. It's not schizophrenia, it's creativity, there is a difference. My voices go away after I let them tell their stories.
Ashley Newell
#50. I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.
H.P. Lovecraft
#51. When a robot dies, you don't have to write a letter to its mother,
P. W. Singer
#52. Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down.
W.P. Kinsella
#53. When a day goes by and I haven't written anything, I better have been doing something worth writing about.
P.S. Bartlett
#54. It's like the P-38 is an old skeleton key I'm trying to fit into an old padlock and when I make that connection I'll hear a click and a door will open and I'll walk through and be saved.
Matthew Quick
#56. Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. I don't know why. Is nobody inspired by our present picture of the universe? The value of science remains unsung by singers ... This is not yet a scientific age ...
Richard P. Feynman
#57. I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.
William P. Young
#58. Here's the bottom line; writers write. Sometimes words flow easily. Sometimes it's like sloughing through mud. Either way a professional writer keeps writing.
P.C. Cast
#59. Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.
P. J. O'Rourke
#60. Writing is both an act of power and surrender. Passion and discovery. It is a tug at your soul that continues to pull you forward, even as you go kicking and screaming. (p.18)
Laraine Herring
#61. . . .She started to feel a bubble of lightness coming up through her ribs. It had been very fragile at first, but she thought now it was made of something stronger than suds. . .
(p. 121)
Natasha Pulley
#62. You're writing a book about Mansa Musa? I didn't know anyone in America knew who he was. He was our Lincoln!
P. James Oliver
#63. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D. James
#64. Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic. [p. 85]
Siri Hustvedt
#67. 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
#68. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.
P.D. James
#69. Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.
P.D. James
#70. I'm not trying to please anyone. I'm just trying to write a damn book.
Richard P. Denney
#71. Grab for time to write instead of wait for time.
Julia Cameron
#72. The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
#73. Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam
#74. In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better.
Brian P. Cleary
#75. 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
#76. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
P.G. Wodehouse
#77. The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
J.P. Donleavy
#78. Being a writer isn't about writing what you want or what you're comfortable with. It's about having a unique awareness and ability to faithfully retell the stories of others.
P. Anastasia
#79. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
H.P. Lovecraft
#80. It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
P.G. Wodehouse
#81. It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.
P.G. Wodehouse
#82. I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P.D. James
#83. One of the most productive times in my early writing life was while I had a full-time job as a word processor in a law firm and also worked part-time at night, often working until 11:00 P.M.
John Lescroart
#84. The one thing that's terrible about traveling for fun is writing about it.
P. J. O'Rourke
#85. I should think it extremely improbable that anyone ever wrote for money. Naturally, when he has written something, he wants to get as much for it as he can, but that is a very different thing from writing for money.
P.G. Wodehouse
#86. I have been writing now for over a week. I find it cleansing, refreshing; it is good for me. (p.531)
Storm Constantine
#87. I cry often.
I cry and cleanse my
face with my tears and
swim to the center
of it all.
A center that
I have written about a
thousand times, forever etched
into the porcelain.
A.P. Sweet
#88. In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, "Can you rewrite this episode before ... 6 p.m.?" So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.
Noah Hawley
#89. You can have the finest pen, typewriter, or computer, but without a set of eyes that truly see the world, you might as well have none of it.
Thurman P. Banks Jr.
#90. Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
P.L. Travers
#91. Writing is a part of life that has to be explored.
P.S. Winn
#92. I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.
El-P
#93. Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
#94. Creative writing teachers should be purged until every last instructor who has uttered the words 'Write what you know' is confined to a labor camp. Please, talented scribblers, write what you don't. The blind guy with the funny little harp who composed The Iliad, how much combat do you think he saw?
P. J. O'Rourke
#95. You are not an "author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.
H.P. Oliver
#96. No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
H.P. Lovecraft
#97. I sip the Dom P watching Gandhi til I'm charged - writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin
Nas
#98. Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
#99. My thoughts are with you all. Forever conscious of the vast, absurd universe and writing my eternal story I shall remain dead, but dreaming.
A.P. Sweet
#100. The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.
Michael P. Naughton
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