What Is Writing Quotes

It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book.

A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Planning to write is not writing.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

It is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

People had been writing to me and saying, "Can you write something for children?" I felt I couldn't quite do it myself because I never had children.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

I don't really know what inspires me to write the music I do, but usually, the music will set the tone for the lyrics.

As for the largest-hearted of us, what is the word we write most often in our cheque-books? "Self.

None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.

Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Provide me with ink and paper and I will write.

Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be

Writing, to be memorable, must be done in a state of impassioned serenity.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.

To write is a humiliation.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.

I was writing a chapter of Beautiful Evidence on the subject of the sculptural pedestal, which led to my thinking about what's up on the pedestal - the great leader.

This morning I deleted the hyphen from "hell-bound" and made it one word; this afternoon I redivided it and restored the hyphen.

I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing

I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

First time he kissed me, he but only kissed The fingers of this hand wherewith I write; And, ever since, it grew more clean and white.

I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without - a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society.

Nothing arrives on paper as it started, and so much arrives that never started at all. To write is always to rave a little-even if one did once know what one meant

It takes two to write a letter as much as it takes two to make a quarrel.

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

It is normal for me to wake and find myself writing in the dark... or to be out of my tomb, caught in an unearthly world, alive with the images that haunt me.

When I write I simply follow my heart. And my flights of fantasy. It is not done with a conscious effort. I'm continually inspired and write reflexively.

Poetry is the most intimate of all writing. I want to speak first from me to myself and then from me to you.

To be in a position, at my age, where I am financially independent, I can help develop things, I can promote stuff that I believe in, I can say no a lot and spend time writing - that is a gift.

You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young.

Quitters don't win and winners don't quit.

I don't really think of time off as writing blocks. I think that's a western notion of demonizing inactivity. When your imagination decides it needs to take a nap. maybe that's what it needs to do.

So if somebody writes a song that appears to have some meaning then everybody thinks that it's a really heavy song.

I have fun writing. I don't make it a chore. I don't have to struggle with it.

After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure.

I try to leave out the parts readers skip.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue... I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision.