About Writing Quotes

Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.

Harlow would later write, "If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.

A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.

It's hard for me to think of writing a novel, because it takes so long.

To write about a place, you have to live there.

Mostly I have to try to censor myself so as not to write things that will hurt other people, or that will go too far.

The different part of writing and singing worship lies in the identity and truth of God's Word and true intention for us as His followers on this Earth.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

It seems to me that you would have to write a novel on a very small, intimate scale for it not to become political.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.

More than periods where I don't write anything, I have periods where I just write junk and I know I'm writing junk but I can't stop.

I seem to have a talent for writing endings that seem just right to me but that frustrate other people.

While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.

I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of "I". I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.

Now, I don't expect what I write to change things. I think I write now simply as a witness. This is how it is. This is what we have done. This is what we have permitted.

I hate feeling too complacent when I write. I like to be solving new problems.

When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode... I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure.

I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

Writing is a private discipline, in a field of companions.

I have a horror of silence while I'm writing. It's like the universe is howling at me if I don't have it.

You don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to write a scene and a character in the English language, with images and words chock full of received meaning.

The world's large enough and interesting enough to take a different approach each time you sit down to write about it.

Writing is a necessity and often a pleasure, but at the same time, it can be a great burden and a terrible struggle.

Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

What I'm constantly striving for in my prose is clarity. So that, ideally, the writing will become so transparent that the reader will forget that the medium of communication is language.

I don't want to indulge myself in the luxury of writing beautiful paragraphs just for the sake of making beautiful writing. That doesn't interest me. I want everything to be essential.

I listen to music all the time. I write while listening to music. And I tell myself that the music nourishes the art forms that I do master and domesticate, and have authority over.

Stalin didn't write any memoirs. He was too secretive. He was afraid people might read them.

When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

I found once you start writing about God it's really fun. It's like a rock singer saying "baby." "Baby, baby, baaayy-by." You start saying "God" on the page and you don't want to stop.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.

The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.

Instead of singing in the shower, I would write out the lyrics of my favourite songs, the ink would turn the water blue or red or green, and the music would run down my legs.

Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness.

My test for writing is always, is this fun or does it feel like a job? Is it moving me? Or am I just fulfilling my own expectations - or even worse, somebody else's?

When I was young, I kept a diary for about 10 years and I had to write in it every day. Even on days when nothing seemed to happen, I made myself think of something to put in it.

Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.

What poet would not grieve to see His brother write as well as he? But rather than they should excel, He'd wish his rivals all in Hell.