What Is Writing Quotes

Writing a novel in general is like trying to reach a mountain top you'll never quite reach - so you try again and maybe get a little closer.

Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.

I'm quite good at multitasking, but I have to do things immediately. I have a book where I write things down: major topics, deadlines, things like that. Every few months, I start a new book.

If one has no heart, one cannot write for the masses.

Write . . . write . . . pencil . . . paper.

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

Someday I would love to write about Vincent van Gogh - his paintings and letters continue to inspire me very much. But it remains hard to find the time and inner rest to write.

I still don't think I have a vocation - and writing is a way of avoiding one.

Writing is a business and should be practiced as such. On days when you think you can’t possibly write a line you do it anyhow.

Writing is the only profession where nobody considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Money is like an arm or a leg; use it or lose it.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.

Holy writing must strive (by all means) for perfection and true holiness, that a door may be opened to him in heaven.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

Always I try to write about people. People are interested in other people always.

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.

My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

Everything I write has a precedent in truth.

The natural way of ensuring that the past continues to live in the present and to inform the future is to write it down.

You know, I say in my lyrics, "Every word I write will be analyzed by somebody white." It's just that I know that this sh*t is just not gonna fall on deaf ears.

Were I to write what I know, the book would be too sensational to print, but were I to write what I think proper, it would be too dull to read.

It's important for me to get back to my fans here and around the world. I feel very, very blessed that so many people have continued to write me and to pour out their love for me and my work.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

You write people as human beings first and then the gender specific stuff second.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear.

A story to me must have some surprise...I must have a passion to write the story.

We write not only for children but also for their parents. They, too, are serious children.

The divine art is the story.

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

I worked from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night for a year to write the first Chicken Soup for the Soul book.

Details are the Life of Prose.

The BALLPOINT PENGUINS, black and white, Do little else but write and write. Although they've nothing much to say, They write and write it anyway.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

More than a career, I feel that I've got a function. I see things in a much more holistic way. Some people bake the bread, and some people write the songs.

I loved and still love watching words flower into sentences and sentences blossom into stories.

I think it's important to remember that writing is a gift and our stories are gifts to ourselves and to the world and sometimes giving isn't always the easiest thing to do but it comes back.

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

Writing is not a profession. It's a calling. It's almost holy.

if I'd thought that nobody would like it as I was writing it, I would have written it even more. But I never think of the audience. I never think of people reading. I never think of people, period.

As a younger man I wrote for eight years without ever earning a nickel which is a long apprenticeship, but in that time I learned a lot about my trade.

Churchill wrote his own speeches. When a leader does that, he becomes emotionally invested with his utterances...If Churchill had had a speech write in 1940, Britain would be speaking German today.

The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.