About Writing Quotes

To write anything tolerable, the mind must be in a natural, proper disposition; provocatives, in that case, as well as in another,will only produce miserable, abortive performances.

No I don't really write thinking about specific actors because it can get in the way a little bit.

I would never write something that made me uncomfortable. Im not sure its even possible.

Most things good for writing are bad for life.

I do have people in mind when I write. I don't know precisely who they are, however, or how many of them there are.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.

I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.

I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.

The more you’re writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it’s at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act.

I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there.

I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about.

I love failure. It's stuff that I'm thinking about all the time in my life, so it would make sense to me anyway to write about it.

I think Shakespeare got drunk after he finished King Lear. That he had a ball writing it.

I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.

I wish I could [keep a journal]. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something.

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

I could never sit down and write jokes.

If you have something to say, here's what you do: You write it down on a piece of paper, you go out in the lobby, and then you go home and you kill yourself.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.

When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.

I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

I spend most of my time writing.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

Once you are a proper, serious law-maker, you can't break the laws you're writing.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

I get to be creative and to write: two of my favorite things.

Hannah writes of love with compassion and conviction.

Oftentimes, when people don't respond to text messages or emails, I just start writing long, long in-depth essays and diatribes where characters start to appear and narrative threads begin.

You can't be afraid to deal with your demons. You've got to go there to be able to write.

I've had trouble being in relationships and writing. This has been a real problem for me. I don't know if it's because I'm not free to fantasize or create these fantasy things about other people

I started writing more with my voice in mind.

I write first for myself as a therapeutic process, to get stuff out and to deal with it.

There's this whole idea that you've got the blues and you're going to write. Bullshit. When I feel really bad, all I want to do is sit in front of the TV with the remote control and check out.

I don't keep a journal anymore. I did when I was a teenager, but now because I write about it all in my songs, that's what I'm really doing.

I usually don't write about my life right when it happens. I process it, and I store it away. Then, when I get in the mood I pull the stuff back out.

Sometimes I dream song ideas. I write a song in my dream, the melody and everything. But then sometimes I can't remember them. I think later on, I probably do.

It's easier to write songs when you're single.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

I write about what I know and also what I don't understand. Emotions for what has transpired.

I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.

I think you learn how to write by reading an enormous amount, so then your memory is stocked with various constructions, various ways of shaping a paragraph, shaping a chapter.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.