Top 100 You Write Quotes
#1. Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.
Edward Hirsch
#2. That you write a phrase or you think of something and it seems to have a deeper charge because the title has to be some kind of marker, something setting out a space, creating a space for what's going to come.
Edward Hirsch
#3. There's always going to be a little bit of autobiographical content to everything. It's how you lend some authority to what you write - you give it that weight by drawing on your direct experiences and indirect experiences from people that you know well, or a little.
Ian Anderson
#4. If you write really good material, the rest just falls into place. There's really no trick to it.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#5. Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?
James Joyce
#6. If you only had a year left to live, what book would you write?
Now, write that book.
M. Kirin
#8. You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.
Sean Connery
#9. I think after you write something and you're finished with it, there is a sense of loss. That this is a world I can't really re-enter the way that I could when I was working on it. The covers of the book close it to the writer.
Anthony Marra
#10. When you write a high-tech thriller, and then people in the defense establishment start calling you - people I can't name - you feel you've hit a nerve.
Daniel Suarez
#11. Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it
Natalie Goldberg
#13. If you write something down on paper, it becomes an actual goal. Before you write it down, it's a thought, a dream that may or may not get done.
Summer Sanders
#14. You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl
from which you never return.
Louise Gluck
#16. In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.
Marsha Norman
#17. You write by sitting down and writing. There's no particular time or place - you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he's disciplined, doesn't matter.
Bernard Malamud
#18. You write to become immortal, or because the piano happens to be open, or you've looked into a pair of beautiful eyes.
Robert Schumann
#19. In a novel, language is your principal tool, you try to build pictures in the mind of the reader. When you write a screenplay, the language is just a transition, the final goal is a picture on the screen, it's the only thing the audience sees.
Philippe Claudel
#20. I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.
Edgar Winter
#21. Writing itself is a dream. There are days of self doubt and deadlines and wondering how you're going to pay the bills until you write that bestseller. But it's still the best job I've ever had. I've also been able to help a lot of people and even inspire a few and that feels great.
Graham Brown
#22. Sometimes a song indicates that it wants to be about a certain thing. And then if you write it, you find that it is about something that you've done.
Jesse Harris
#23. Old memories are very easy to get except that once you write about something you've destroyed it.
Annie Dillard
#24. I don't really think our government at heart wants peace. So I urge you, write to Mrs. Laura Bush, because she reads.
Sandra Cisneros
#25. You write five different things, and none of them work, and then suddenly something does, and you ask yourself, 'Why did that last one work?' I think that's the way the artistic mind works. All writers and artists of all kinds often don't know why things work.
Gilbert Morris
#26. When you write music that expresses doubt or concern, or talks about some of the darker things that a developing human goes through, people will come out of the woodwork to listen to someone else say it out loud.
Tyler Joseph
#27. How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".
Shubham Choudhary
#28. Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
Malcolm Gladwell
#29. Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you?
George Orwell
#30. Whatever unspeakable act done to you, write it down, read it, then ball up the paper & sling it hard into the wall. Expunge it from your soul
Ace Antonio Hall
#31. When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.
David Mitchell
#32. I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.
Pico Iyer
#33. And so instead, when you write, I hope you fall in love.
R. YS Perez
#34. I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
W.S. Merwin
#35. You write?" "Why, all the time," said Locke, "except of course when I'm wrong.
Scott Lynch
#36. You write a book and it's like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean. You don't know if it will ever reach any shores. And there, you see, sometimes it falls in the hands of the right person.
Isabel Allende
#37. When you write about the people you hate the most, do it with love.
Hubert Selby Jr.
#38. If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.
Stephen King
#39. In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.
Jessica Cutler
#40. If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.
Emily St. John Mandel
#41. You must become an expert on a product, service or anything you write about to really be effective.
Joseph Sugarman
#42. When you write an article about anything, trolls use the comments to attack. They feel frustrated - but haters are losers. It's not good to feed this aspect. It's more intelligent to be constructive.
Paulo Coelho
#43. This business [moviemaking] isn't easy. It's a hard business. You just keep plugging away until you figure it out. You write something you love and keep banging on people's heads until somebody lets you do it.
Amy Sherman-Palladino
#44. But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.
Rabih Alameddine
#45. My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs ... write life. I decided to take her up on that.
R. Kelly
#46. To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.'
Rebecca McClanahan
#48. I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.
Lawrence Weschler
#49. There's always things that you know about that nobody else, because everybody's life is different. So you write about what you know. That's number one.
Jackie Collins
#50. Typing and read receipts make a lot of sense for messaging. You write a letter, you put it in an envelope, you send it to a friend, and you want to know when they get it. It's like FedEx - they let you know when the package gets dropped off.
Evan Spiegel
#51. You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.
Arthur Ransome
#52. My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.
Dan Gilroy
#53. Life is a cutup. And to pretend that you write or paint in a timeless vacuum is just simply ... not ... true, not in accord with the facts of human perception.
William S. Burroughs
#54. My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
Elmore Leonard
#55. Suicide is the role you write for yourself. You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged
where they will find you and how they will find you. But one performance only.
Philip Roth
#56. Writing is a tough business, but never forget the reason why you write. It's for the love of story telling. Fame and fortune may elude you, but that's no reason to give up. Remember, there's always someone ready to listen to a good story.
Robert Bartram
#57. It's not how big your pencil is; it's how you write your name.
Dave Mustaine
#58. As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
David Bergen
#59. Every single line that you write, you hang on every single word, and you hang on every single moment.
Green Day
#60. Don't be afraid of your own imagination. No matter what you write, there's always someone out there who will appreciate it.
B.A. Gabrielle
#61. Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.
W.P. Kinsella
#62. Art is not a job for an artist, just as religion is not a job for a priest." He runs his fingers through his hair again. "Sometimes I see myself as almost like an academic. My artworks are not really products; they are papers that you write when you have finalized a strain of thought.
Sarah Thornton
#63. You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.
Jess Walter
#64. You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.
Thulani Davis
#65. What you write should entertain you and serve you first. Don't worry about maintaining anything beyond your own attention. Focus on exorcising your demons in the work. If you can do that, then you'll succeed in the world.
Chuck Palahniuk
#66. I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.
Richard Eyre
#67. Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.
Garrison Keillor
#68. I have a philosophy that everything you write doesn't have to be good for everybody. There are going to be people that get irritated by some of the things I write-including my parents. And then there are going to be people that you draw in because of the pointedness of certain things.
Sheryl Crow
#69. If you write something in the evening or at night, look back over it the next morning. I tend to be less self-critical at night; sometimes, I've looked back at things I wrote the night before, and realized they were no good at all.
Mark-Anthony Turnage
#70. You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.
J.K. Rowling
#71. Think before you write, and write before you think again
Faiza Afliha
#72. If you want to write, you write. Talent is simply not enough.
Jane Yolen
#73. Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.
David Chuka
#74. Whenever you write music, you want it to touch people on a certain level. I mean, I've been reading tweets about 'Troublemaker' and people saying 'OMG, I can so relate to this - this is a guy that I fancy, or a girl that I fancy; it's exactly like this person.'
Olly Murs
#75. It's a good thing you write fiction. If you had to describe the real world, nobody would recognize it.
Peter Straub
#76. When you write for very young children what they want is something familiar and safe and stereotyped.
Helena Bonham Carter
#77. Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.
Ray Bradbury
#78. If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.
Jimmy Breslin
#79. Everything you write makes you better. But if you really need a tip, here's one: a good story begins in opposition to its ending. That means you work out how it finishes first, and then begin the story as far away from that point - in terms of character development - as you can.
Chris Wooding
#80. [Everything you write is] not simply a collection of words, but a means of influence not to be taken lightly. Let your recipient's emotions be the gondola, and your words, its gondolier.
A.J. Darkholme
#81. If you want to be a writer, you write. Everybody wants to get published. You gotta play your long game.
Paul Harding
#82. Sometimes when you write something on the page, it can seem very funny, but when you act it out - and this happens to me a lot, actually - the melancholy of the situation becomes more front and center.
Mike White
#83. You write to help yourself think better, then think to help yourself write better.
Joseph Williams
#84. Remember, if you write anything nasty about me, I'll come around and blow up your toilet.
Courtney Love
#85. When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
Ernest Hemingway,
#86. It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.
George R R Martin
#87. I think when you write, you should call it a "writing spree." I don't write every day, and I don't write regularly.
Etgar Keret
#88. When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.
Jay Asher
#89. Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it's got a certain kind of significance.
Paul McCartney
#90. If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.
Dani Shapiro
#91. So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.
Danny Elfman
#92. You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.
Grace Paley
#93. I have to practice to be good at guitar. I have to write 100 songs before you write the first good one.
Taylor Swift
#94. Do you think we make sad things into songs in order to hold on to the sadness or to banish it - I think it is to banish the sadness. So then if you write a happy song, is it not sadder than a sad song because by making it you have banished your own happiness into a song?
Sarah Ruhl
#95. If you are never satisfied with what you write, that is a good sign. It means that your vision can see so far that it's hard to come up to it. Again I say - the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them, the ocean is only knee-deep.
Brenda Ueland
#96. When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. I love London - its where I'm born and bred - but New York just has such an energy when you're walking around, and if you act or you write and you act like I do, its just such a good town for you because people here like people who can do more than one thing.
Cush Jumbo
#98. It's weird because when you initially write a song, you write it with no understanding that the world is maybe going to hear it one day. So when you go into the studio, you don't see the hundreds of people at a gig or the viewers on TV, you just write a song without any inhibitions or boundaries.
Jessie J.
#99. First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It's one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.
Bruce Springsteen
#100. Child that is a beautiful note," the chief justice praised her, "but the next time you write your title, add an O to the countess.
Patricia Grasso
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