About Writing Quotes

I'm very unhappy when I'm not writing.

Sometimes I think what I write is funny in its quiet way.

I do not think writers or anybody would sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

I've always disliked words like inspiration. Writing is probably like a scientist thinking about some scientific problem, or an engineer about an engineering problem.

I don't think in terms of optimism and pessimism when writing a story. I am telling a story.

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.

I don't want to see any art-writing gobbledygook or overblown words in an essay about me. If a smaller, simpler word will do - use it.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

I can't write what I don't believe in.

You can't write about things without doing them. You just have to live that same way.

I don't care how good a song is. If it holds back the storyline, stalls the plot, your audience will reject it.

A song doesn't just come on. I've always had to tease it out, squeeze it out. 'No thesaurus can give you those words, no rhyming dictionary. They must happen out of you.

I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning could write a poem two pages long. Could she have brought it to a music publisher?

I'm not looking to write the great American novel, win a Pulitzer or teach history. I write to entertain my readers.

Despite his persecutions, Mr. [Upton] Sinclair reveals himself in Money Writes! to be an enviable man. Always the thing he desires to believe is the thing he feels he knows to be true.

Upton Sinclair is his own King Charles' head. He cannot keep himself out of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he doesn't.

What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.

Sure, you make money writing on the coast ... but that money is like so much compressed snow. It goes so fast it melts in your hand.

You can find truly original pieces of writing, but they're original because you go, "Who would have even have thought of that?," or, "Why would anyone ever want to go see that?"

I just write songs, I make music, and I have several times over reinvented my life in order to keep making music and just make music all day. I don't know. It's just what I have to do.

Often I'll find clues to where the story might go by figuring out where the characters would rather not go.

I'm always writing a new book even when books are being shopped around, and none of my books has been published in the order that they have been written.

It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, "Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth." It's funny.

I have a lot of books I want to write.

It's around midnight. After I left Dad, my choice was to either become very drunk or write this. I chose to write this. It felt kind of now-or-never for me.

I think writing would have happened to me anyway, somehow. Differently, but it still would have happened.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Writing a new film about cereal killers. Not serial killers, cereal killers. The main character can eat two, three boxes at a time.

Please use anger for something positive like hurting people that deserve it or writing jokes.

Writing good jokes requires effort. Think I'll just start dressing funnier.

A kid is a guy I never wrote down to. He's interested in what I say if I make it interesting.

When I write I like to just say everything that people think about but never express vocally. I just get deep into it; I'm a bit obsessive about music.

I would never write, ever. I might as well exile myself.

Writing was something I always did but that turned into singing and rapping. That something that came out of my writing.

The truth is, writing and directing are two very different jobs. They're not even remotely the same job. It took me a while, as a director, to understand that.

I do love writing but it is a lonely profession. You're lonely and optimistic at the same time.

I wanted to write a book that maybe had the potential to go beyond the Deadspin and KSK [Kissing Suzy Kolber] readership.

Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.

Writing novels reminds me of being an awkward 15-year-old typing on a Commodore 64 in his bedroom, trying to be the next Stephen King.

I do write songs about love but I don't really know love that well.

We don't know what we're writing until it just comes out. We don't sit around crunching numbers

I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly.