About Writing Quotes

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk

David Mamet, Tim Kazurinsky, and Denise DeClue, who adapted [ About Last Night]. Between the three of them... I mean, it's always down to the writing. You're only as good as your writing.

A lot of young writers wait for inspiration. The inspiration only hits you at the desk.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

Hopefully, I write what I don't know.

Whether you're an unpublished novelist or a sixteen-time New York Times bestselling author, you can always improve your craft. You can always become a better writer.

I am not fully forgiven until I allow God to write his new dream for my life on the blackboard of my mind. .. God has a great plan to redeem society. He needs me and wants to use me.

Keep a gratitude journal. Write down at least three things a day you are either thankful for, made you smile or genuinely inspired you.

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

With comedy, if you write something for me, I'm better at it. I'm not sure I'm so good at improvisational stuff.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood.

The secret of writing comedy is to know where it's all going, then get ahead of it.

There's the inherent value of the arts in terms of what that does for the quality of life and culture. The arts - in my case theater, play-writing - is all about community.

I was dressed up as a witch for Halloween, and wanted to write a story about my black cat before I went out trick-or-treating. I think it went out with the trash the next day.

I've never had a "hankering" to direct. I can perform, but I can't write on that level. I tend to go off on tangents. Directing also requires a kind of specificity and I don't have it.

Twenty to one offend more in writing too much than too little.

The God we worship writes his name upon our faces.

I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

Writing a funny story is one thing. But writing a funny story that inspires others to venture beyond their level of comfort in pursuit of their greater good is what makes me come alive.

The actual act of writing brings me such pleasure - to tell stories, to engage in cultural criticism, to reflect, to question, all of it is invigorating.

A pen went scribbling along. When it tried to write love, it broke.

I never base a character on someone I know. You can get ideas from real life, but every character you write is some aspect of yourself.

What does literature do for me? I think I solve problems in my writing. They may be my problems, but perhaps others share them, and in the process of working these through, I hope to entertain.

For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.

I love acting but I also love writing, especially comedy.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

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.

There were a lot of people who were willing to write a letter for me. Not because I was academically inclined, but because I worked hard.

I come from a long line of people that write. My folks ran a weekly newspaper.

I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

..to write and to live are very different. Many who praise virtue, do no more than praise it.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

That's what you need for your writing - to learn how to be present, learn how to be calm. So take that nap, do that meditation.

They write songs about California girls for a reason.

No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.

Even writers need relief from words.

I just feel much more secure about whatever I write if I stand with one foot in reality - meaning if the stories I write about have a core of "this actually (could have) happened."

Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.

A good novel is worth more then the best scientific study.

Here I am, a Palestinian Arab who only knows how to write in Hebrew, stuck in central Illinois.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

It's pretty much rock-'n'-roll. I sit down and start feeling stuff and writing.

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.

All I owe the world is my art.