Top 100 Writing Your Own Quotes
#1. You get a lot of who you are as a musician across through the music you write. If you're writing your own music, then it's important to be really honest.
Harry Styles
#2. Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.
Aziz Ansari
#3. Writing your own story around the same ideas is not plagiarism; at worst, it's being unoriginal.
Charles Stross
#4. Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.
Judith Krantz
#5. Rock is all about writing your own script; it's all about pioneering.
Courtney Love
#6. You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else's script.
John Taylor Gatto
#7. If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
Caroline B. Cooney
#8. You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking.
Wayne Kramer
#9. When you're writing your own fiction, you don't have to ride two horses.
Elliott Colla
#10. Qualities absolutely necessary for a historian: (1) Imagination. (2) Prejudice. (3) The power of writing your own biography at the same time.
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
#11. If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book
Maz Jobrani
#12. As an actor, it's a relatively passive job unless you're generating your own content or writing your own content. So to a certain degree you're at the mercy of what is available, what you're reading, what you become passionate about, and ultimately, what people want to hire you for.
Elijah Wood
#13. There was no romantic ending for Charlotte, but that's where writing your own novel can be so useful.
Catherine Lowell
#14. It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.
David Levithan
#15. If you're not writing your own story, you're a character in someone else's.
Chris Brogan
#16. Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.
Charlotte Eriksson
#17. Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
Enya
#18. Imagine yourself in the scene. See what there is to be seen. Listen to the sounds. Touch the world. Smell the air. Taste it. Use all of your senses. Then evoke those experiences for the reader. If you give the audience the flavor, they'll flesh out the moment in their own imaginations.
David Gerrold
#19. The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
#20. Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's way-you will have to make a way of your own.
Sarah Orne Jewett
#21. Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You're giving a gift. You're helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They'll become real.
James Chartrand
#22. One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
Mark Twain
#23. It's great for my daughter to see Beyonce and Taylor Swift, women that are in charge of their own careers, writing songs from their own perspective and taking people to task. That's very different from when I was growing up - it was all like, 'Stand by your man.'
Corin Tucker
#24. Never let negativity derail your journey as a writer. Use the energy for your own betterment.
Guadalupe Neri
#25. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#26. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.
Jennifer Fallon
#27. I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published ... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.
Markus Zusak
#28. 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
#29. Writing is much more satisfying on a certain level than acting ever was. Because you're not interpreting someone else's original idea, you can come up with your own.
Michael Beck
#30. The secret to writing is to get your own pain - shout it out till it hurts your throat - weep it into your pillow - then write it down ...
John Geddes
#31. People put off writing thinking they don't have the time or enough of an opinion to matter and that is crap. You are the only one standing in your own way, so get started.
C.C. Chapman
#32. The ultimate thing is creating your own stuff and making projects for yourself. That's what Seth Rogen does. He's writing and producing a lot of the movies that he's the lead in.
Hannibal Buress
#33. Writing in the dark is hard, but you have to light your own candle and do it anyway.
A.D. Posey
#34. A book is never, ever finished. You simply get to a point where you and your editor are reasonably happy with how it is and you go with that. Left to our own devices, a writer would endlessly fiddle with a book, changing little thing after little thing.
Kimberly Pauley
#35. Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#36. I think when you're writing films that just come fresh out of your own imagination - I think probably anyone who's done that, there are certain themes or styles.
Lisa Cholodenko
#37. When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.
Pat Barker
#38. If you don't like a language, you can go write your own.
Helen DeWitt
#39. Work from your own side of literature/ & room fetish, not "publishing's" -
Jack Kerouac
#40. This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.
Holly Lisle
#41. Writing novels allows you to create your own world.
Norman Shabel
#42. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of coarse you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.
Stephen King
#43. Write your own book instead of reading someone else's book about success
Herb Brooks
#44. Believe in your own identity and your own opinions. Proceed with confidence, generating it, if necessary, by pure willpower. Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it. Use its energy to keep yourself going.
William Zinsser
#45. Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
Eleanor Catton
#46. There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself.
Anne Rice
#47. All of fiction is truthful. What you create is your own truth and no one can take that away or change it.
Walter Dean Myers
#48. Don't expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.
Leslie Gordon Barnard
#49. Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.
Nicholas Jarecki
#51. It's really fun to be writing and producing your own sketches. You almost have more control.
John Mulaney
#52. When you're writing something new, writing something that's your own, basically you have nothing else to do except either invent a trick, use someone else's trick, or have no trick and get a bad performance.
Nico Muhly
#53. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
Clarice Lispector
#54. In writing with detail, you are turning to face the world. It is a deeply political act, because you are not staying in the heat of your own emotions. You are offering up some good solid bread for the hungry.
Natalie Goldberg
#55. It's a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to.
Woody Allen
#56. You should never write your own resume, personal ad, or obituary. In all three cases it is better to show your humility by letting someone else lie for you.
David Hayden
#57. I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn't matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.
Wayne Dyer
#58. I realized that you have to deal with a lot of baggage when you write about your own era, that it's harder to separate what is actually compelling from what is interesting simply because it mattered to you at the time.
Christopher Castellani
#59. Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
Michael Crichton
#60. There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.
Steven Knight
#61. I would assume that there is a greater amount of joy for you in being able to write and help produce your own stuff and make a decent living, but not get rich versus always doing the other stuff that you don't write, and make more money.
Julie Delpy
#62. There is really no practical help that one can offer; it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own convictions, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live.
Truman Capote
#63. Writing is solitary. You spend so much time alone and in your own mind, telling stories.
Ruth Ozeki
#64. When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.
Gao Xingjian
#65. The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
Lou Doillon
#66. Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
Joseph Campbell
#67. I think one of the pitfalls of doing your own music is that sometimes you can never be satisfied with it: you're afraid to say that it's done, and you keep reworking it or re-recording it or re-writing it.
Adam Schlesinger
#68. You're alone with yourself and your own feelings and that gives you deeper access to what you need to get in touch with to write poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#69. Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#70. Sometimes people just can't take how real the world can be. Even if they're your friend they'll drop away from you like petals from a dying flower to keep their own sanity.
Jason E. Hodges
#71. I actually think leaving your children alone to fantasize, to write, to make projects on their own is good for them. Breathing down their necks is a form of control. Children should have their own space.
Erica Jong
#72. Read a ton, write every day if you can, and don't mimic another writer's style. Find your own voice.
James Patterson
#73. For me, writing [was] a question of survival ... I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.
Gao Xingjian
#74. It's easier to write about heartbreak after you've had your heart broken. You have more material to draw from, you can extrapolate from your own experiences and make reasonable assumptions about how your characters would feel and act.
Patrick Rothfuss
#75. Even when I'm writing in character I'm normally still writing about things I know or things that have happened to me or using that character to start an exploration of my own consciousness. Really though, any character that you can examine is just an examination of a part of your own consciousness.
Karen Walker
#76. What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.
Zachary Lazar
#77. People have said, 'Why don't you make your own company like Chan-wook Park has his own company,' but my head is full of writing and directing and I don't feel like I want to run a company. That's not really within my personality as well.
Bong Joon-ho
#78. If you can't write your own material, you have very little chance of making it as a comedian.
Rodney Dangerfield
#79. It's all risk. And if it isn't, it needs to be. The real trick is to find the risk that is right for you, a risk that doesn't take you so far out of your own identity that it's not a you that you recognize who's doing the writing.
Jim Krusoe
#80. I started drawing at a very young age. Writing a story wasn't satisfying, but to actually draw our own world - it's like controlling your own dreams.
Daniel Clowes
#81. It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#83. Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.
Tom Robbins
#84. Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
(Casual Chance, 1964)
Colette
#85. If you take the time and put in the effort to write your own material and absolutely refuse to be denied the right to make your film it is difficult whatever colour you are.
Denzel Washington
#86. Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own
and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.
Benjamin Percy
#87. But a huge part of being a writer is discovering your own intellectual and aesthetic autonomy, and how you best get the best words onto the page.
Paul Harding
#88. When you're writing, you're on your own, and I like to work as a team.
Carine Roitfeld
#89. It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
William Golding
#90. There is nothing more frightening or exciting than a blank piece of paper. Frightening because you're on your own, leaving dark tracks across that snowy plain, and exciting because no one knows your destination but yourself, and even you can't say exactly where you'll end up.
Robert McCammon
#91. You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own.
Hugh MacLeod
#92. When it comes to who will like your writing; the ones who will like it will like it because they can relate to the story or can find a piece of their own story hidden within - regardless of the mistakes. The ones who won't, never will - no matter what.
Beverly S. Harless
#94. I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support.
Mary Gaitskill
#95. I never talk about what I'm writing about currently, never. It's private work on your own, no need or obligation to talk about it. Writers are made into performers these days, including myself, but there are some instances in which I will not perform.
Nadine Gordimer
#96. Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Angela Carter
#97. You've got to be willing to read other people's code, then write your own, then have other people review your code.
Bill Gates
#98. Generally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#99. To write good SF today ... you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.
Gardner Dozois
#100. Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.
Kendrick Lamar
