Top 100 Writing To Learn Quotes
#1. That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.
Sandra Cisneros
#2. 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
#3. I honestly think that in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?
Anne Lamott
#4. You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matters to you.
Ralph Fletcher
#5. 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
#6. We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
Sue Monk Kidd
#7. Writing is difficult all the time; the thing is to learn something every day.
Richie Benaud
#8. [Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
Anais Nin
#9. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#10. We are trained to teach users but are not trained to help them learn.
Suyog Ketkar
#11. I would love to learn archery. Unfortunately I'm too busy writing and drawing ten thousand comics a month. Maybe one day!
Jeff Lemire
#12. 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
#13. Write your own music and write frequently. Go to as many live shows as you can as well (of bands you enjoy of course). You can learn a lot watching other performers.
Dia Frampton
#14. I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
Irvine Welsh
#15. If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don't read big Tolkienesque fantasies - Tolkien didn't read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.
Neil Gaiman
#16. In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business.
Ted Allen
#17. No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
Paulo Coelho
#18. 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
#19. A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere
even in prison.
Louis Auchincloss
#20. There is no better way to learn how to write than by writing a novel.
Lawrence Block
#21. Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.
Julia Cameron
#22. A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.
Anthony Trollope
#23. You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!
Ray Bradbury
#24. Most writers in the course of their careers become thick-skinned and learn to accept vituperation, which in any other profession would be unimaginably offensive, as a healthy counterpoise to unintelligent praise.
Evelyn Waugh
#25. My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.
Hannah More
#26. Don't waste time looking for a better pencil: learn to write better.
Seth Godin
#27. Those who will not take the trouble to think for themselves, have always somebody that thinks for them; and the difficulty in writing is to please those from whom others learn to be pleased.
Samuel Johnson
#28. You learn to do your best writing on story rather than off story. Very often at the beginning of their careers, writers including me do their best dialogue writing off story - the best lines, the best observations - but they haven't got enough to do with the plot to stay in.
Victor Levin
#29. My biggest problem about writing is whenever I write piano pieces, because I then have to learn to play them, which is sometimes not so easy.
Philip Glass
#30. You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch
Susan Boles
#31. For me, that emotional payoff is what it's all about. I want you to laugh or cry when you read a story ... or do both at the same time. I want your heart, in other words. If you want to learn something, go to school.
Stephen King
#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. When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life - that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don't listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
Ray Bradbury
#34. Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.
Seymour Papert
#35. I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you
Ernest Hemingway,
#36. I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
Henry Miller
#37. I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.
John McGahern
#38. For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.
Tad Williams
#39. But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#40. You should write, write, write every day, and learn to edit and pare it right back so you're proud of every sentence, and each one is either being useful or beautiful, but hopefully both.
Caitlin Moran
#41. That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.
William Faulkner
#42. I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.
Mal Peet
#43. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'
Simon Winchester
#44. I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things.
Joan Baez
#45. Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
Ernest Hemingway,
#46. I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.
Jennifer Haigh
#48. LEARN FROM THE MASTERS:
Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Colin Nissan
#49. An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart.
Uri Shulevitz
#50. You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it's really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.
Diane Setterfield
#51. Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.
Truman Capote
#52. 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
#53. You need to take some acting classes to learn to hide your huge crush on my husband better
Mary Papas
#54. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still traveling, still a seeker.
Carl Sandburg
#55. You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.
Gene Wolfe
#56. Quite honestly, most people are quick to "write someone off." But our God is a God of the second chance. Learn from One who is patient with you, and you'll learn to be patient with others.
Woodrow M. Kroll
#57. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals.
David Denby
#58. The only way to learn and hone your craft is by working hard and writing regularly.
Darren Shan
#59. When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.
Marie Lu
#60. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.
Gerry Abbey
#61. I've grown up with a piano in the house, and that's where I started to be able to learn things by ear. Guitar kind of happened, and I was using it just for writing at first. Then, I was writing so much that I began to realise that I knew how to play, and that's when I started getting nerdy about it.
Gabrielle Aplin
#62. I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.
Steve Carell
#63. None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.
Thomas L. Dumm
#64. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.
Colm Meaney
#65. Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.
Jami Attenberg
#66. Before me and beside me sat a row of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their shoulders long hoods trimmed in white fur. Who and what they were I know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not be so mediaeval as they looked.
Henry James
#67. Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#68. The last story you should write is the most important story. You should start with a story that is just an amusing, entertaining, fun story to write and learn your writing chops with the least important things before you start applying them to the most important things.
Chuck Palahniuk
#69. But as I wrote the book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet], I tried to write it as clearly and directly and passionately as possible just thinking of communicating to readers who might want to learn about this great thinker and be inspired by him as I was.
Jeffrey Rosen
#70. Now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he's much sharper. So you, too must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because the will make you a better person.
Paulo Coelho
#71. Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.
William Zinsser
#72. If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.
Ann Patchett
#73. i.e., TestNG". This technique helps a beginner learn how to read the code before writing the code. The following are steps to install Selenium IDE: Steps
Rex Allen Jones II
#74. Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.
Octavia E. Butler
#75. Writing is a bit like swimming. You learn writing by doing it and you learn swimming by doing it. Nobody learns how to swim by reading a book about swimming and nobody learns how to write by reading a book about writing. If you want to learn how to write, write a lot and you will get better at it.
Robert Munsch
#76. I've learned so much from just being in film industry. I definitely want to stay in front of the camera and learn more from as many people as I can. Somewhere down the line, writing, directing and producing would be fantastic.
Nico Tortorella
#77. Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.
Stephen Dobyns
#78. You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
Jean M. Auel
#79. I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#80. In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.
Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.
Chitralekha Paul
#81. Children live in a way that is very generous. They learn from a young age what you value; they watch your every move. If you value writing, they will learn quickly to value it too, as something they can give to someone, or receive with pleasure from someone else.
Pam Allyn
#82. You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.
Nancy Kress
#83. As a writer I have always fought for the right to write. For writing is a time-honored means of communication. Lack of communication, the refusal of some to understand, or outright refusal to learn about other human beings is based on fear. Fear is what keeps people apart.
Piri Thomas
#84. For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.
Alan Lightman
#85. My advice to writers is this:
Walk, talk, breathe, laugh, cry, fall, rise, fail, succeed, run, jump, love, hate, hide, seek, learn, work, play, feel, LIVE.
Then write it down.
S. Alex Martin
#86. Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.
Ray Bradbury
#87. We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.
Stephen King
#88. When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.
John C. Bean
#89. A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.
Margaret Fuller
#90. Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#91. The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
#92. The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
William Zinsser
#93. Being in the hearing world was more of a challenge than being in the Deaf world, because I had to learn how to write and communicate in a way that I hadn't experienced growing up.
Jack Jason
#94. Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#95. I don't feel any kind of a responsibility (other than to myself) to write "weighty" lyrics. In fact I sometimes wish I could learn to write in a simpler form, to be more direct and I'm going to be experimenting with this.
Stuart Adamson
#97. The good days are when you perform; the slow days are when you learn to perform better. The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
Chris Cleave
#98. I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.
Eudora Welty
#99. It was like passing the scene of a highway accident and being relieved to learn that nobody had been seriously injured.
Martin Cruz Smith
#100. When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people.
Wayne Kramer
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