Top 100 Written As Quotes
#1. Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well.
Jennifer Beals
#2. Many of the songs were written as a way of paying tribute to specific people, but in the end the songs took on a life of their own and I didn't worry about accuracy or biographical truth, so it's not a problem.
Michael Gira
#3. All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#4. I have a reputation for doing superheroes, but I like all kinds of writing. In fact, hardly anybody knows this, but I've probably written as many humor stories as superhero stories.
Stan Lee
#5. I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes.
Neil Peart
#6. It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.
Norton Juster
#7. Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written - as long as I keep my senses, at least.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#8. Poetry must be as well written as prose.
Ezra Pound
#9. Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.
Lynn Abbey
#10. I think sometimes women who are supposed to be strong are also written as mean and vindictive.
Yancy Butler
#11. Books are for the most part willfully and hastily written, as parts of a system to supply a want real or imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
#12. I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this.
Josh Radnor
#13. You might not see one in a hundred with
gentleman so plainly written as in Mr. Knightley.
Jane Austen
#14. The only description for Nolan in the script was that he's a very bad dresser. I put on a red windbreaker and every other ugly, ill-fitting thing I could dig out. He was potentially written as a clean-cut nerd, but I wanted a darker spin.
Gabriel Mann
#15. When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.
C.L.R. James
#16. Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.
Edna O'Brien
#17. She had discovered with surprise and pleasure that as she turned each page, the book was written, as if for the first time, all over again.
Arturo Perez-Reverte
#18. Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
Alan Bennett
#19. There is a growing revolution in the field of human consciousness, as a quest for deeper meaning at the personal level emerges. This book has been written as a contribution to the evolution of human consciousness, seen through the eyes of both practitioners and clients.
Peter Smith
#20. British currency was configured in pounds, shillings, and pence. One pound equaled twenty shillings, written as 20 s., which in turn equaled 240 pence, or 240 d. A new pound is equal to 100 pennies, with one penny equal to 2.4 of the obsolete pence.)
Erik Larson
#21. Some of the stories in Dogwalker were written as long as four years ago, but I wouldn't say I've been working on this collection for four years. I have always been a little unsure of whether I could make it as a writer so I've held other jobs and worked on other projects this whole time.
Arthur Bradford
#22. Vernon Bogdanor's account The Monarchy and the Constitution is written as much in the shadow of Edmund Burke as it is of Walter Bagehot. He stresses the organic development of the British constitution, prefers evolution to revolution, and thinks stability is better than strife.
David Cannadine
#23. I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.
Val McDermid
#24. Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow.
Sophie Hannah
#25. History should be written as philosophy.
Voltaire
#26. Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul's School.
E.C. Bentley
#27. You know, I haven't written as much as most other writers. Certainly maybe those who keep a more regular schedule accomplish more.
Wallace Shawn
#28. Harper, your song has a sorrowful sound,
Though the tune was written as gay.
Your voice is sad and your hands are slow
And your eye meeting mine turns away.
Anne McCaffrey
#29. If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me.
Paolo Maldini
#30. Keep the tourists out, some tourist from Salt Lake City has written. As fellow tourists we heartily agree.
Edward Abbey
#31. 'Restaurant Man' is kind of the story, an unabridged story of what happened in my life, the good bad and ugly. Some people might glean some life lessons. It is honest, not written as a press release.
Joe Bastianich
#32. The story of humanity can be written as the struggle to acknowledge all human beings as human beings.
J.S.B. Morse
#33. No, the shark in an updated JAWS could not be the villain; it would have to be written as the victim, for, worldwide, sharks are much more the oppressed than the oppressors.
Peter Benchley
#34. Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. A story is an end in itself. It is not written to teach, sell, explain or destroy anything. It is not written even to entertain. It is written as a man is born - an organic whole, dictated only by its own laws and its own necessity - an end in itself, not a means to an end.
Ayn Rand
#36. ...Time had seemed infinite when she still had many years and decades ahead of her. A book waiting to be written: as a girl, that was how she had seen her future life. Now she was sixty, and the pages were blank. Infinity had passed like one long continuous day.
Nina George
#37. The Constitution itself, plainly written as it is, the safeguard of our federative compact, the offspring of concession and compromise, binding together in the bonds of peace and union this great and increasing family of free and independent States, will be the chart by which I shall be directed.
James K. Polk
#38. Already by 1900 I could boast I had written as many books as Moses.
Winston Churchill
#39. If you do write down your passwords, don't make it obvious which password corresponds to which account. Even better, write the passwords incorrectly and make up an easy rule for fixing them. You could decide to add 1 to each number in your password, so that 2x6Y is written as 3x7Y.
Barton Gellman
#40. Novels are written - as life is lived - One Day At A Time.
Lawrence Block
#41. Had I but written as many odes in praise of Muhammad and Ali as I have composed for King Mahmud, they would have showered a hundred blessings on me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. The releasing of attachment to object and certain beliefs was already indelibly written as a very necessary step in my human progress toward being.
Marlo Morgan
#43. My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#44. He looked at his foreword, written, as ever, in his customary green ink, with the simple, if guilty, hope that in the abyss that lay between his dream and his failure there might be something worth reading in which the truth could be felt.
Richard Flanagan
#45. I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.
Jerry Pournelle
#46. I remember reading scripts when I started in the business, and [Latino roles] were either nonexistent or written as the maid or a drug dealer. We're no longer just that. I'll play any part that challenges me. What's important is that all races have choices.
Eva Mendes
#47. There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great.
Denise Mina
#48. If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.
Ernest Hemingway,
#49. The king and the would-be queen," Ailinn said. "As it was prophesized, as it was written, as it was seen.
E.J. Stevens
#50. My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.
Diane Wakoski
#51. Usually if you read a screenplay, no matter who's writing it, the bad guy is always written as a one-dimensional bad guy.
Mickey Rourke
#52. The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.
Simon Schama
#53. The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
Alexander Hamilton
#54. It's nice to play a character who's written as a mixed race character and is not a drug addict.
Howard Charles
#55. Every year I hear people complain that the quality of screenplays and movies is declining. In my opinion, the vast majority of scripts written - as well as most movies that are released - are not very original, well-written, or interesting. It has always been that way, and I think it always will be.
Viggo Mortensen
#56. I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'
Maya Angelou
#57. The best, most natural dialogue is usually written as if the writer is listening to dictation. You might get stuck on any particular point and have to question yourself; but normally, dialogue writes itself.
Ayn Rand
#58. Jane Austen never did marry. Why doesthat statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a diferent meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived.
-David Whyte
David Whyte
#59. Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.
Thomm Quackenbush
#60. 'Killing Pablo' to me - as much as I love 'The Grey's script - 'Killing Pablo' to me is the best thing I've ever written.
Joe Carnahan
#61. It is often written that, during his presidency, the General was not a politician. Of course, he was a great politician in large part because he was not perceived as a politician. It
John Ripin Miller
#62. Bands have always written songs against what they see as wrong. Ronald Reagan really made for a lot of songs.
Henry Rollins
#63. Ultimately you're trying to reach across and find some other person, some other human warmth. But it is, especially in written poetry, it is inscribed in a text and the text can't do that work by itself and you as a poet can only do your best.
Edward Hirsch
#64. But define 'completely ridiculous shit,'" Duvall said. "Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don't understand that crap at all. As far as I'm concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.
John Scalzi
#65. I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.
Jodi Picoult
#66. Some Christians see the biblical teaching on homosexuality as reflecting the culture and times in which the Bible was written and not reflecting God's eternal perspective on homosexual people. Others believe these scriptures represent God's timeless will for how human beings practice intimacy.
Adam Hamilton
#67. Our deal always was that we did one as scripted always, we got it like we thought we needed - so we were all happy with it as written. Then I'd let him play as long as we had time.
Blair Underwood
#68. the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.
Whitley Strieber
#69. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.
Henry David Thoreau
#70. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.
Timothy Pina
#71. Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#73. Much has been written about the loyalty of dogs, but what I love about them isn't their devotion to me so much as their devotion to being alive.
Steven Bauer
#74. The unfolding of a story is both as exciting and as difficult for each and every novel I've written, regardless of time and place.
Rose Tremain
#75. 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
#76. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.
Diana Gabaldon
#77. Stories, as much as we like to talk about them, retrospectively, as emanations of theme or worldview or intention, occur primarily as technical objects when they're being written. Or at least they do for me. They're the result of thousands of decisions made at speed during revision.
George Saunders
#78. I don't know if kids still read it, I just know that for me - as a boarding school kid - the book had a lot of resonance. It was a well written book. I was honored to play a part in that movie version.
Parker Stevenson
#79. There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed or in some way musically measured,
is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.
Henry David Thoreau
#80. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#81. I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
Salman Rushdie
#82. I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.
Adam Hochschild
#83. For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
John Darnielle
#84. Great is repentance, because for the sake of one that truly repenteth the whole world is pardoned; as it is written (Hosea xiv. 4), 'I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for mine anger is turned away from him.'" It is not said, "from them," but "from him.
Various
#85. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris West
#86. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
George R R Martin
#87. And then, as if written by the hand of a bad novelist, an incredible thing happened.
Jonathan Stroud
#88. You appear in the Novelletten in every possible circumstance, in every irresistible form ... They could only be written by one who knows such eyes as yours and has touched such lips as yours.
Clara Schumann
#89. Live your life as if it was written by Aaron Sorkin
Jonah Bergan
#90. Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.
Horace Mann
#91. How do we turn our heart to the Lord? One way is in going to the scripture to see him. "In the volume of the book it is written of me," Jesus said. In 1 John 3:2 we find that when we see him as he is, we are going to be like him, we're going to manifest him.
Kay Fairchild And Lisa Perdue
#92. I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
Raymond Chandler
#93. The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.
Dahr Jamail
#94. I find the songs I want to record by listening to as much music as I can. 'When I hear things I really like, I ask the writers to send me a tape of everything they've ever written.
Alison Krauss
#95. Lord Rodrik Harlaw was neither fat nor slim; neither tall nor short; neither ugly nor handsome. His hair was brown, as were his eyes, though the short, neat beard he favored had gone grey. All in all, he was an ordinary man, distinguished only by his love of written words.
George R R Martin
#96. When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.
William Howard Taft
#97. I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
Philip Roth
#98. In my youth I regarded the Universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we are able to decipher a small fragment.
Arthur Koestler
#99. As you probably know, I've written a lot about the presidency, so it's obviously exciting when you get to interview a president and write about it.
Nancy Gibbs
#100. All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, with the exception of the written word: which is its mechanical part.
Leonardo Da Vinci
