Writing Table Quotes

#1. My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.

Honore De Balzac

#2. One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Gustave Flaubert

#3. Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

Natalie Goldberg

#4. Stiff shoulders humped over the writing-table, and the ache of a heart slow to move. A tortoise heart.

J.M. Coetzee

#5. A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#6. I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.

Rose Macaulay

#7. The room boasted many luxurious perks: a narrow bed, a rotted writing table, a stained wall, and a warped looking glass dangling on a rusty hook. I wondered if Mr. Kent recommended this hellish place so I would hurry back to his home.

Tarun Shanker

#8. I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.

Haruki Murakami

#9. Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.

Mary Stuart Masterson

#10. I feel clobbered by the impossibility of translating into words as much of this enormous world we live in with its subtly complex and sprawling Periodic Table of emotions. To quote Freddie Mercury, I want it all.

David Mitchell

#11. You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.

Mary Stewart

#12. It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

Peter Morgan

#13. I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.

Randy Bachman

#14. When I'm drawing, I only do that at home, really, at my drawing table. But writing I could do in other places. So I've written in airports, in hotels, different places.

Kevin Henkes

#15. It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

Michelle Richmond

#16. It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Each morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread, the table with the Phone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#17. When I was six, someone in my family gave me a yellow pencil holder that had my name printed on it. I still have it, and when I'm doing table work in rehearsal, I use it to carry my highlighters and other writing utensils. I love it.

Seth Numrich

#18. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter ... a marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

Agatha Christie

#19. I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I'm doing fiction.

Gore Vidal

#20. I developed the habit of writing novels behind a closed door, or at my uncle's, on the dining table.

Patrick White

#21. I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

Sadie Jones

#22. And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

Jonathan Safran Foer

#23. I don't want to re-write the same old book with the same tired techniques. I'd rather bring something new to the table that's true to me and that people will have a genuine reaction to. That's the whole point, isn't it?

Veronika Carnaby

#24. I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers - I didn't get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.

Alice McDermott

#25. When I naturally write a story and I feel that the guy (is) sitting across the table from the girl and flirting with her ... I think, 'God, that can't be me' because I'm just too old for that part. You need a 30-year-old or a 35-year-old for that part. And so I've given myself less and less roles.

Woody Allen

#26. When you're writing fulltime like I am, writing to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head and food on the table, you can't afford to have writer's block.

Brian Keene

#27. Now, go, wirte it before them in a table and note it in a book, that it may be fore the time to come for ever and ever. Isiah 30:8

Isiah From The Bible

#28. Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.

Anne Lamott

#29. It seems like just yesterday my son was hiding under the table to avoid reading. Now, he's writing books longer than mine!

Rick Riordan

#30. Sometimes I just want to sit and write at a clean table and not get paint all over my hands.

Danny Fox

#31. I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Amy Waldman

#32. My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great.

Nick Harkaway

#33. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last.

Bram Stoker

#34. You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

Markus Zusak

#35. One theme I ran into over and over while writing about the periodic table was the future of energy and the question of which element or elements will replace carbon as king.

Sam Kean

#36. The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners ...

Natalie Goldberg

#37. I go to restaurants and the groups always play "Yesterday." I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us "Yesterday." He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing "I Am The Walrus.

John Lennon

#38. It wasn't that I couldn't write. I wrote every day. I actually worked really hard at writing. At my desk by 7 A.M., would work a full eight and more. Scribbled at the dinner table, in bed, on the toilet, on the No. 6 train, at Shea Stadium. I did everything I could. But none of it worked.

Junot Diaz

#39. The only thing a closed book is good for is a table that wobbles. Be an open book.

A.D. Posey

#40. Yeah, Under The Table And Dreaming shaped the way that I think about writing songs.

John Mayer

#41. Whether she was writing to tell her followers about a local cheesemaker, a new farm-to-table restaurant, or what to do with an exotic heirloom fruit that was organically produced and newly marketed, she spent hours each day scouring Philadelphia and the outlying towns for material.

Barbara Delinsky

#42. The table I write on I say exists ... meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it.

George Berkeley

#43. There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

John Lydon

#44. I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.

Anthony Marra

#45. It's very important, at least to me as a writer, that there be some rules on the table when I'm writing. Rules come from genres. You're writing in a genre, there are rules, which is great because then you can break the rules. That's when really exciting things happen.

Lev Grossman

#46. I don't have any office; I can write everywhere. So, I put a piece of paper on the table, and then I travel. Literally, writing for me is like travelling. It's getting out of myself and living another life - maybe a better life.

J.M.G. Le Clezio

#47. Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

Paul Fussell

#48. What I want my father's writing to keep teaching us is that at the table of writing, everyone is welcome. No voice without all voices.

Kim Stafford

#49. A hundred cabinet-makers in London can work a table or a chair equally well; but no one poet can write verses with such spirit and elegance as Mr. Pope.

David Hume

#50. I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

Conrad Hall

#51. The table was covered with food like roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, roast turkey, roast liquorice and, the centrepiece, a roasted knight.

Elias Zapple

#52. Always read with a pen in your hands, not beside you on the table, but actually in your hand, ready, armed ... Put a question mark by everything you find suspect. Underline anything you really appreciate. Feel free to write 'splendid,' but also, 'I don't believe a word of it.' And even 'bullshit.'

Tim Parks

#53. A labourer cannot sit at the table and write, but a man who has worked at the table all his life can certainly take to physical labour.

Mahatma Gandhi

#54. I think talent is like a water table under the earth - you tap it with your effort and it comes through you.

Natalie Goldberg

#55. What I didn't realize is that the writing process for comedies is that you do your table read, and if you aren't funny on that first day during the table read, they take your jokes away and give them to somebody else.

David Morse

#56. Stories hang from the trees, hive under the coffee table, gather like glass on the corners of the road. To pick them up one needs simply to focus one's eye and keep a steady hand. Writing focuses the eye; writing develops the steadiness of one's hand.

Bonnie Friedman

#57. The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

Fran Lebowitz