About Writing Quotes

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

The only time to believe any kind of rating is when it shows you at the top.

I hope never to retire. I write so many because it's the thing I like to do most - to write. And if you write every day, you just naturally get a lot of books.

To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

What matters in modern music is not the part you can write down, the words and the tune, but the rest - the texture, the atmosphere, the references and associations.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading.

Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

To write a song you must have an imagination, to have an imagination you must be free.

Self-disciplin e is necessary, but so is playfulness, flexibility, joy. When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, your writing desk will become a spacious place.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister.

I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable.

The way I write is generally about love. I have a great fascination about the subject.

Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill.

Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.

All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

Keep an idea log where you write everything down, even the bad ideas.

The songs that I sing and the songs that I write have always just been what I feel my voice does well, and what my inspirations have been and a kind of culmination of everything.

Try not to write the parts that people skip.

The ending has to fit. The ending has to matter, and make sense. I could care less about whether it's happy or sad or atomic. The ending is the place where you go, “Aha. Of course. That's right.”

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

What a woman says to an eager lover, write it on running water, write it on air.

While we can remember the past, we cannot write the future. Only our children, the future of our community, can do that.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

And sometimes I sit down to write, because that is what I like to do more and more in the future.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

It takes more talent to write music, but it takes more courage to write lyrics.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

In old movies, the cinematography is a thousand times better than anything today. Writing, a thousand times better.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

I just love life. I love people. I love to write, that's my gift. I love to sing. I have a good attitude. I like to think I shine from the inside.

It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.