Writing Tools Quotes

#1. You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

Barry Mann

#2. Scientists require apparatus, but mathists splendidly require only writing tools and erasers. Better, philosophers do not even need erasers

Gregory Benford

#3. For a perfect holiday I need my iPhone and my writing tools. I write all my books by hand so black felt pens and yellow legal pads are a must. And my eyebrow pencil. I'm very low-maintenance.

Jackie Collins

#4. Good writing is good writing no matter what genre you're writing in, and I believe that there are only a handful of fundamental craft tools that are essential for any genre-including nonfiction.

Georgia Heard

#5. I use three main tools in writing: instinct, hard work and dumb luck. Dumb luck is missing a train and, while you wait for the next one, writing a key word, line or verse. When this happens often enough you begin to believe in Fate.

David Massengill

#6. All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind - the culture - has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Annie Dillard

#7. Thought for the day: Twitter ... 140 character limit ... must be a great tool for fortune cookie writers ...

E.A. Bucchianeri

#8. There may be 300,000 apps for the iPhone and iPad, but the only app you really need is the browser. You don't need an app for the web ... You don't need to go through some kind of SDK ... You can use your web tools ... And you can publish your apps to the BlackBerry without writing any native code.

Jim Balsillie

#9. It's difficult to write a really good short story because it must be a complete and finished reflection of life with only a few words to use as tools. There isn't time for bad writing in a short story.

Edna Ferber

#10. By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Wallace Stegner

#11. I have found that the tools for my trade- writing, are very basic: paper, a pen, time, food and perhaps a little tequila...

Jose N. Harris

#12. It goes without saying that a good Catholic novel should be good craftsmanship, good writing skills. The creative person must always be engaged in the long labor of perfecting the tools of his art. Yet the work itself need not be explicitly evangelical in its themes and plots.

Michael O'Brien

#13. We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week.

Miguel Ferrer

#14. 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

#15. Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

Stephen King

#16. My first teacher was Steven Spielberg. I worked on Amazing Stories. That was my first job, as a writer and as a story editor. Watching him and his command of the tools of filmmaking, and his admiration for writing and the story itself, was the greatest lesson I ever had.

Mick Garris

#17. What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.

Jeffrey Rosen

#18. I always loved writing as a tool of expression.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#19. Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.

Jamaica Kincaid

#20. Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.

Ken Hill

#21. It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

Ann Patchett

#22. The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#23. The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

Tony Kushner

#24. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.

Paul Auster

#25. If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King

#26. All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

Nina Bawden

#27. It took a while to find a passion for another career that was as strong as the passion that I had for football. Once I found it in acting, it was simple. Use the tools you were given from playing football and apply it to your new passion. I have done that through acting, producing and writing.

Maurice Hall

#28. I use improvisation as a writing tool to help produce material that goes into a script, but a well-crafted script shouldn't sound scripted, and oftentimes people confuse something that looks like improvisation for what is actually a very well-written script that is well-acted.

Steve Coogan

#29. I'd always thought that if I could get sober and stay sober, I would be able to have a career making music. My drug and alcohol addiction was the one thing holding me back. I had finally gotten the tools to stay sober, and it was just a matter of writing the songs.

Macklemore

#30. Punctuation is a fabulous tool for controlling your reader - you even get to control where they breathe. That's what I call power!

Nicola Morgan

#31. Melodrama is one of my working tools and it enables me to obtain effects that would be unobtainable otherwise; on the other hand I am not deliberately melodramatic; don't get too annoyed if I say that I write in the way that I do because I am what I am.

Graham Greene

#32. With the right tools, you can write anything ...

Jeff Lyons

#33. The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.

Keith Miller

#34. Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.

Walt Whitman

#35. I'm close to my audience. I think I have more tools in my box than other guys who might try it. Also, I know how to do this stuff. I know how to write and shoot and edit. I'm technically adept and that helped with the website. You need a big skill set.

Louis C.K.

#36. It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.

Stephen King

#37. There's an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it's self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It's not a tool to understand myself.

Michael Pollan

#38. I was able to not fold and go in a corner because I had my writing as therapy, but also as my tool for struggle.

Edwidge Danticat

#39. In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

Rita Dove

#40. I think that writing texts, publishing texts, selling texts in a physical book store is one of the important tools for breeding this new generation.

Alexander Mamut

#41. I just like being all over the place and writing whatever comes to mind. Having the tools? It's such a gift.

Regina Spektor

#42. The simplest tool of the writer is repetition ... The simplest tool of the writer is repetition.

Philip Gerard

#43. If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the tools to write.

Stephen King

#44. I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively ... For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.

Hunter S. Thompson

#45. I'm a creative person and I use painting, acting, writing, writing songs, or whatever, as tools to just get a point across, in order to communicate a story or an emotion.

Michael Marisi Ornstein

#46. this lightness is something created in the writing, using the linguistic tools of the poet, independent of whatever philosophical doctrine the poet claims to be following.

Italo Calvino

#47. Silicon Valley builds its bridges on abundance. Abundant bits of information floating out there, writing great programs to process it, then giving people a lot of useful tools to use it.

Robert Kyncl

#48. I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.

Miriam Toews