About Writing Quotes

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

The wider the author's arsenal of tools and the better technically equipped the storyteller is, the better the tale will be.

Everyone has a set of presuppositions: what gender is, what it's not. And they may not write them out or they may not be in theoretical books published by Routledge, but they have a theory.

I always write what feels really true and honest and me.

I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.

My job is writing. I get paid to do it. When was the last time you heard someone challenge a doctor for making money off of cancer?

I write about my life and the lives of people around me and situations, and the idea's for each record to try to make you a better person, to understand the life that you lead more.

Music has seven letters, writing has twenty-six notes

To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

I write mostly positive reviews. I don't write about places that don't interest me.

Just write about what bites you and damn the rest.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

Songwriting is like ... being possessed. You try to go to sleep but the song won't let you.

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

I can't pass up a blank book when I see it in a bookstore. And I write a sentence in it, and then I put it away.

If you text 'I love you' and the person writes back an emoji - no matter what that emoji is, they don't love you back.

I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.

I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

Write like a motherfucker.

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes

I write songs because I have to write them, and if I didn't I'd be doing some other kind of music that didn't require a song.

And in Hollywood, you know, everyone is an expert. Most of them are expert editors. They can't direct, they can't write, they can't act, but, by God, they all think they can edit.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

God have mercy on the sinner Who must write with no dinner, No gravy and no grub, No pewter and no pub, No bellyand no bowels, Only consonants and vowels.

I would still give my left ball to write anything as good as OK Computer.

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

I do think it is important to look at the writing as a job though and to commit to it like you'd have to commit to a regular nine-to-five.

The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

I'm actually forced to write about Michigan because as a native of that state it's the place I know best.

I've got no ego; I just like to have thousands of people write to me and tell me how wonderful I am.

Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.

It's part of what I do at my piano - the hymns. And then I write.

You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

The writing is just a boring job. It's just a horrible job.

It's not easy to writing thank-you notes for the stuff you didn't want in the first place.