About Writing Quotes

I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy.

You learn to write by doing it.

Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.

To write for children at all is an act of faith.

I do my best to write my way through it. It helps the laughing, reflective part come quicker.

All I ever wanted to do is to write stories that people will enjoy and feel at home with.

It's a lot easier to write about people when you're not living with them!

Novels definitely come more naturally to me. When I write short stories, it's always a fight against it expanding.

I think I'm someone who can prattle on a long time about something, which serves me well as a novelist, but it's the enemy when I'm writing short stories.

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.

A lot of writing about being a mother is not so much writing about the kids themselves. They become placeholders for the shift that happens when you're suddenly in charge of other people.

The last couple of years have been a write-off, though I'm beginning to feel like a person now. My energy is coming back.

I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.

In the end, you have to write like you're not afraid of the critics.

Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.

I would like to say that I was inspired to write 'Shiver' by some overwhelming belief in true love, but here's my true confession: I wrote 'Shiver' because I like to make people cry.

Vehement writing, even if it is charged with truth, is no answer to violent action.

A labourer cannot sit at the table and write, but a man who has worked at the table all his life can certainly take to physical labour.

I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don't know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it?

When I'm writing, I thoroughly enjoy it. It just goes on.

When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.

Personal & Confidential. Letters so marked should be. When the contents are only printed matter, though, the minifrauder succeeds in sowing illwill & ire.

When writing, you can't break physical rules. You can't have people come back from the dead. That's cheating. I am a kind of narrative fundamentalist in many ways.

So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.

As a writer, I know that - you write a first draft and then put it in a drawer. The longer I can put it in a drawer, the better off I am. So I structure my writing so that things can sit.

I write a lot on airplanes actually because it's completely isolating; there's no one to talk to, there's nothing to do.

Being honest...[to reporters] Not the worst thing in the world. Don't write that down.

People don't actually, a lot of times, know the game behind the game. If people think that they do, it's a little bit of a naïve assessment of how the [writing] industry works.

I've always been an all around creative person. Song writing and writing are great ways for me to express myself.

[Alex] Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor.

Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader.

The thing is, with writing, it's form or content. You need to write about something interesting or you need to write about it in an interesting way.

I'd always wanted to write a song about a leather jacket and how wearing it makes you feel. I love leather jackets, and I've got a big collection of them.

I liked the idea of writing a song saying I'm happy with who I am, and I don't mind if people think I'm some old git.

People always go on about sleaze, but I think it's only a small part of what I write about.

I'm excited and terrified to write something new.

I created a tone for network television that they hadn't really been seen before. And I have to admit that was really more of an accident. I was just writing the way I write.

On Stranger Than Fiction, the script was so good that I stuck to every line because it was just such brilliant writing from Zach Helm that I felt like I really just want to shoot the page.

The guy who sits at the keyboard and types is so much smarter than I am. I think I got into writing so that I could spend as much time with that guy as possible.

When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

I just wanted to be a good comic and had no sense of show business, but at some point you want the opportunity to write a show about your life.

I think things evolve into jokes. I don't generally write them down as jokes. I talk them out.

As far as the style, I can't say there is one definite style. I probably feel most comfortable writing in a tonal idiom, with considerable, if not extreme chromaticism.

Emphasizing and rewarding length over quality results in worse writing and more reader abandonment.

Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available.

He does not write at all whose poems no man reads

And much as I enjoy writing and creating stuff, I don't enjoy it so much that I am willing to give up any time that could otherwise be spent performing.

I didn't want to just write a series - I wanted to write an epic, on story that spans three books, where decisions made in the first impact the last.