What Is Writing Quotes

Write 10 times: 'Fear is my friend. Fear is the energy to do my best in a new situation.' You don't have to believe it; just write it.

I am not a politics wonk. I like the idea of my writing reflecting more about who I am or other people.

When you make a choice as a writer about what it is you want to write, and what it is you're going to spend six months thinking about, you have to fall in love.

It's really a lovely feeling to write knowing that failure is taken off the table because if it's bad you just never show it to anyone.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

The thing that I'm most in love with is the thing that I'm writing at the moment.

If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean.

As a professor I can't teach writing.

I write when I have something to say and not when I don't. My time is better spent if I know I have nothing to say. I don't consider it writer's block; I just don't have anything to say.

But I still feel I waste a lot of time leaning on my elbow and thinking to myself, 'alright sucker, now what?'

I do have pleasure when I'm writing. I mean, I'm aware of pleasure. And sometimes I make myself laugh, with a joke or something; or I feel gleeful.

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.

Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.

There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant.

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.

Writing's deeper function is to serve as a way to find shapes and names for the world as you have come to know it; to find on paper what you know and feel.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

As far as I am concerned, I write novels, and other people can do the labelling.

You can learn all sorts of rules and techniques of writing and still not be able to assemble something beautiful or enchanting.

Most writers I know move back and forth between the rational and the intuitive, though there are some who approach writing very rationally, and others who claim not to think their work through.

It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

I mostly write to music, even though I know I sound free-form a lot. Then there are times when I'll have a concept and hold on to it until I come across the right music that makes a marriage.

Most composers and arrangers these days use computer programs and keyboards, but I'm one of those dinosaurs that still writes it down on score paper and still dreams it up in his ear first.

An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing.

The habit of prayer communicates a penetrating sweetness to the glance, the voice, the smile, the tears,--to all one says, or does, or writes.

I think the thing that interests most actors these days is the strength and the quality of the writing. I think that's the main thing.

The simplest tool of the writer is repetition. . . . The simplest tool of the writer is repetition.

You will not read voice on the page; you will hear it in your head.

It's not enough simply to record the way people actually talk. The dialogue must be concentrated, shaped, dramatically moving, in a way that real-life conversation seldom is.

We create an interior 'movie' in the reader's head through words on the page.

For the big stuff to work credibly, you've got to get the little stuff absolutely right.

The only way to write a novel is to proceed as if you had all the time in the world.

In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

And of course, in my writing, there is the constant theme of music, love of, preoccupation with, music. Music is the single thread making my life into a coherency.

I started reading SF when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

There are many critics whose work I greatly admire. Even though I diverge from T.J. Reed in several important ways, I've learned greatly from his writings on Mann.

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

[Truman Capote] was not only just selling his writing, but he was selling himself as a person.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.