About Writing Quotes

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

You have to throw yourself away when you write.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

I could not think without writing.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.

. . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

I was always cutting words. I even would write my jokes in my notebook. I still do this, almost like a poem.

I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

What I used to do between writing fits was feed my kids, ride my horse and go shopping for cat and dog food.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

Sometimes my brain writes a check that reality can't cash.

I started freestyling with friends about eight or nine years ago. I started writing also around the same time, but didn't meet blockhead until about '94. I started making beats not until about '96.

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.

Good writing is like a bomb: it explodes in the face of the reader.

I love composing and writing music and dancing and performing and conceptualizing creatively for visual mediums. I love to create.

Nothing could be more natural to me than writing music.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.

Novel writing wrecks homes.

CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

I do not write, I build.

The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries. Everything else is relative levels of hell.

Every time you write a song, you're looking for some sort of perfection, and you never quite reach it. You're always looking for that extra missing piece.

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.

Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.

I always do my draft in long hand because even the ink is part of the flow.

I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

There're no novels that I like to read so I write my own novels, and then I read them again, and it's the best thing.

Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

Make me a willow cabin at your gate, And call upon my soul within the house; Write loyal cantons of contemned love And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

Writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time.

You must write for children the same way you write for adults, only better.

When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.

I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.

You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

Eloquence is the power to translate a truth into language perfectly intelligible to the person to whom you speak.