About Writing Quotes

I find writing really hard, but then, every author I know finds writing really hard work.

An author is often obscure to the reader because they proceed from the thought to expression than like the reader from the expression to the thought.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

Photographers direct the eye toward a particular object. We who write, one hopes, are directing the heart and the soul.

I'm very parasitic, from my own experiences. I just go and mine my dirty laundry, you know, and go through it until I find something that's interesting enough to me to write a song about.

I'm not a very good communicator, so maybe that's why I write about talking.

When you finish for the day, write a note reminding yourself of what you plan to do next. This helps you to remember today's great idea when you get back to work tomorrow.

I wasn't put on this earth to amass money or personal wealth. I was put on this earth to play guitar and write songs.

One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there's no confusion about who's to blame: You are.

In some ways I'm a reticent man, and for quite a number of years there wasn't very much of my real true deep feelings in my writing.

Writing for a newspaper is like running a revolutionary war. You go to battle not when you are ready, but when action offers itself.

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book, and would never read or trust any writer who did not also do so.

An absolute joy to read - it stimulates and engages. Westney is asking new questions not addressed elsewhere . . . and you will be drawn in by the author's inviting, yet quietly compelling style.

I loved teaching. It was my world. I only left because I was overwhelmed with three careers - teaching, writing, and my family.

There was a time when I thought I turned terrible things over in my mind because I read and wrote too many scary stories. (Note self: start writing about unicorns and bunnies)

Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.

I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."

I'm more interested in writing about the personal stories of people. Sometimes I don't agree with them.

Often I have to move my body in a certain way, like exercising, to begin to get into the right rhythm for writing a song.

Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

If the guy that writes you checks says cut your hair, off to the barber shop you go. That's that.

I'm only 49 years old. I'm still in the middle of this whole thing. I don't feel like it's finished at all. I'm still planning to write better songs.

Sometimes you write a song in a certain era and it's got a certain kind of significance.

I don't think it's very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting.

You can write a letter with a typewriter, a pencil, or a crayon. What you have to say is the important thing.

Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.

You can't write about a friend, you can only write about a former friend.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

In fiction there can be no appeal to any authority outside the book itself. . . . the thing has to look true, and that is all. It is not made to look true by simple statement.

I used to do horseback riding in the South, and it was just things I'd be pasting. I think my diaries was just an infantile desire to record things. I liked saving things instead of writing.

I would like to write my next book about what happened to critical intelligence in America and how it's been undermined by these really shallow ideas about human life and nature.

I tried to write worse but it was no good; my generalizations came out as before, each more exquisite than the last. I grew discouraged.

I don't want to write my life. I live my life. I want to make up a new world.

Writing a screen play with a group of collaborators is like the Lennon McCartney collaboration .... sometimes one or two people do more than others on certain parts of the process and vice versa.

Whoever you are, you've got to start from where you are. If you're a sailor, and only know sailor's language, well, write in it, for God's sake.

There's no posterity to write for. I'm writing now for mutated arthropods.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

I just figured if I'm going to call myself a songwriter throughout my life, then writing for most genres of music is something I should at least attempt.

I don't really belong to that world and I don't think anyone's going to miss me. I'm much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely.

I'm like a blue-collar writer. I just sit down every day and I write.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

Each book starts from ashes.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.

I can never understand why people who have not seen me for a while ask if I am still writing. They might as well ask me if I am still breathing.

I did not know at first that it would be a series; I discovered after the first novel that I had more to say about it, so I did another. And another, and then the readers demanded yet more.

It is better to arouse envy than pity.

I really become the characters when I'm writing them. I'll become one or two of them more than others, I'm consistent that way.

Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.