Writing That Tells Quotes

#1. Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Jeff Lindsay

#2. Any writing teacher tells you to write what you know, and for better or for worse, Washington is a world I know well.

Kristin Gore

#3. Life tells the most beautiful stories.

A.D. Posey

#4. A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage tells of a young boy's travels through the black heart of Depression American and his search for light both metaphorical and real. Writing with a controlled lyrical passion, Marly Youmans has crafted the finest, and the truest period novel I've read in years.

Lucius Shepard

#5. If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

David Mamet

#6. The writing is - I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.

Toni Morrison

#7. My three favorite travel writers of all time are Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, and Chuck Thompson. Smile When You're Lying not only tells the truth about the travel-writing racket, it gets to the heart of some of the travel industry's best-kept secrets.

Kinky Friedman

#8. If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its
laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people
most of the time.

George Gerbner

#9. I love Charlie, Billy Burke's character. Writing for him is so spectacular, he's so funny and wry and every scene he's in he just takes. There's a scene in 'Eclipse' where Bella tells him she's a virgin, and it's the funniest, most awkward scene I've ever seen on film.

Melissa Rosenberg

#10. The way that I write songs is pretty simple. I hear music first, much like you would when you're scoring a film. I usually hear a soundtrack in my head, and after I get that soundtrack, it tells me what it's about, what it feels like, what the emotion is, and the words come after.

Lauren Hart

#11. Ugh! How many stories about love, copulation, marriage and death already exist, not one of which tells the truth! How sick I am of well-constructed plots and brilliant writing!

Sadegh Hedayat

#12. Good writing takes advantage of a reader's expectations of where to go next. It accompanies the reader on a journey, or arranges the material in a logical sequence (general to specific, big to small, early to late), or tells a story with a narrative arc.

Steven Pinker

#13. Williamson, writing in 1810, tells us that the passes were so infested with tigers that the roads were almost impassible. 'Day after day, for nearly a fortnight, some of the dak people were carried off at one or other of these passes.' In

Ruskin Bond

#14. The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth.

M. Molly Backes

#15. Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Paula Danziger

#16. English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

Dean Wesley Smith

#17. I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

John Irving

#18. Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

George Bernard Shaw

#19. Nightclub City tells the behind-the-scenes story of Manhattan's glamorous nightlife at its peak. Packed with colorful characters, terrific original research, and an unusually accessible writing style, Nightclub City is a gritty social history of America's most glitzy fantasies.

Debby Applegate

#20. Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

Lisa See

#21. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out. What

Margaret Atwood

#22. When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

Lenny Kravitz

#23. I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.

Paul Auster

#24. It's very much a character-based play. Conor's writing is almost musical and paints pictures at the same time. It's a joy as an actor to be able to say the words. It's very conversational but at the same time, tells a story.

Sean Mahon

#25. Some people are born with an ear for music, some people are born with a talent for drawing, some people...have a built-in radar that tells them where a comma needs to go in a sentence.

Krystal Sutherland

#26. Every painting tells a story.

A.D. Posey

#27. Come with me to the mountains. Every stone there tells a story.

Avijeet Das

#28. The songs we sing invite the participation of the listener, who is central to finding a way of creating the life of the song at that listening. It's the difference between poetry and didactic writing. One tells you, 'This is it,' and the other says, 'Let's find this together.'

Peter Yarrow

#29. The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

Emile M. Cioran

#30. Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.

Fennel Hudson

#31. Definition of a Writer: One who tells stories that demand to be told.

Ana Patrick

#32. It is the tale, not he who tells it.

Stephen King

#33. I can be really silly when I'm not actually writing silliness, and I have to rein that in. Pynchon, in my opinion, sometimes tells elaborate shaggy dog stories just to work up to a pun or punch line. My challenge is to use humor and wordplay to reinforce the emotional core of the novel.

Mary Kay Zuravleff

#34. Every work of art tells a story.

A.D. Posey

#35. No one ever tells you that: that there's no method. Writing's a lawless place.

Naomi Wood

#36. I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

David Byrne

#37. A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.

Anne Lamott

#38. Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.

Marty Rubin

#39. The creator of Bambi was secretly writing pornographic novels on the side. This single fact tells you everything you need to know about turn-of-the-century Vienna, and why it was the perfect place for Sigmund Freud and his far-fetched theories about the human psyche.

Eric Weiner

#40. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

#41. A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#42. The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.

Robin Sloan

#43. Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#44. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.

Patti Scialfa

#45. Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.

Brenda Ueland

#46. Learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking ... so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.

Brian D. McLaren

#47. An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

Chris Everheart

#48. The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides ... It's the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you're writing, because the teacher won't like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in.

Seth Godin

#49. When anybody tells you something about writing, somebody will tell you something completely different and they will also be right

Melvyn Bragg

#50. Just at the moment he's writing a book on famine - goodness! it's sad - and there's a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.

Nancy Mitford

#51. If someone tells you something is impossible, make it possible.

A.D. Posey

#52. I consider my greatest strength my complete and utter faith in a loving God. Strong family values are also important and I do not hesitate to write them into my books. My reader mail tells me this is something that readers especially like about my books.

Debbie Macomber

#53. Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

Neil Gaiman

#54. As far as poetry, I don't know if I've ever written any. I've read a lot. I just write and it comes out in different forms and shapes. I don't know if I'm any good at it I just really go for it and I'm very prolific book wise only because I own the company. No one tells me 'no' around here.

Henry Rollins

#55. I listened to this interview once with Jerry Seinfeld that really influenced my comedy and all of my writing, which is that when you're starting out in comedy, it's the audience that tells you what's funny about you. And you need to listen to that and make a note of that.

Mike Birbiglia

#56. Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

Eudora Welty

#57. 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

#58. When the storyteller tells the truth, she reminds us that human beings are more alike than unalike ... A story is what it's like to be a human being-to be knocked down and to miraculously arise. Each one of us has arisen, awakened. We do rise.

Maya Angelou

#59. [N]o such thing as objective writing, ... every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.

Sue Hubbell

#60. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

G.K. Chesterton

#61. George Smith shows how many of the prophet's followers embraced plural marriage during a period when the LDS Church was emphatically denying the practice ... [and he tells this in] a lucid writing style.

Daniel Walker Howe

#62. Because here's the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

Steven Brust

#63. I'm 100 percent original, and that's what got me here. My rap music is more understandable, slower. It tells a story. You can write a book on each of my thoughts.

Tupac Shakur

#64. Come with me to the mountains. Every rock there tells a story.

Avijeet Das

#65. If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

Fernando Pessoa