About Writing Quotes

Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.

2010 has been awesome. I got to write on the David Hasselhoff Roast this summer, and that's always been a dream.

As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them: that you simply want to collect their money.

In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor.

I'm used to writing songs and songs-I can fill em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book (Chronicles, Vol. 1), you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted.

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.

Heartbreak can definitely give you a deeper sensibility for writing songs. I drew on a lot of heartbreak when I was writing my first album, I didn't mean to but I just did.

If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

I find that writing unit tests actually increases my programming speed

At first glance it may appear too hard. Look again. Always look again.

A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

A great reader seldom recognizes his solitude.

For the creation of a masterwork of literature two powers must concur, the power of the man and the power of the moment, and the man is not enough without the moment.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios.

Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas.

It's so easy to get caught up in your own self-doubt when you're writing. It can be so easy to tell yourself, "Who am I kidding?"

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

I took up writing to escape the drudgery of that every day cubicle kind of war.

Syzygy, inexorable, pancreatic, phantasmagoria - anyone who can use those four words in one sentence will never have to do manual labor.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.

The writing in mathematics text is not only laconic to a fault; it is cold, monotonous, dry, dull, and even ungrammatical... The books are not only printed by machines; they are written by machines.

Brevity in writing is the best insurance for its perusal.

Do you think I know what I'm doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it's writing, or the ball can guess where it's going next.

I've always thought it was arrogant to write about yourself, particularly when you're still alive.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

Every book changes my writing because I'm always trying to do something I didn't do before. I try to do what's hard for me, what I haven't done in the past.

Be your own teacher. Let life write your textbook.