Writing Quotes

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

I write about the things I feel strongly about.

You cant write about stuff you dont know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.

Anybody can write a film script 'cuz it has been reduced to a formula.

I found it more pleasurable to write something, sing a melody over it. At a very young age, I kind of honed my writing skills, I guess.

I don't listen to music for fun. I ain't got enough time for fun! I'm always busy writing my own music. I don't try to compete or see what other people are doing.

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

I have a certain pool of subject matter that I like to write about, things that interest me: politics, religion, ecology, and relationships between men and women. And that's usually what I focus on.

I'm always writing at night - things I would change, things I would do differently. When I write a note, it sticks in my head differently.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

Your life is a blank page. You write on it.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be.

Keep it in tune with the times, but don't write with the specific purpose of trying to create a hit. If you're doing it strictly to make money, you're crazy. There are easier ways to make money.

All those writers who write about their own childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

I need to write in a small room - the smaller the better. I can't write in a big room where someone might sneak up behind my back.

I was really artistic. I did a lot of poetry, a lot of writing.

I used to do poetry and write stories and stuff - I never really had anybody standing over my shoulder, like, "What did you write? Let me hear it." I hate that type of stuff.

Only a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

The best person to write for is yourself—and what better place to start than in a journal.

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene.

I think the moment you start trying to please a fan base is when you start going downhill. I'm going to always, always write about what I want, even if it doesn't necessarily cater to most of them.

I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton: January 19. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.

If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

The ideal view for daily writing, hour for hour, is the blank brick wall of a cold-storage warehouse. Failing this, a stretch of sky will do, cloudless if possible.

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

We're not descended from fearful men - not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

It is crazy even to ask what creativity is. It would be just as useful to interview a caraway plant in your garden and ask: "How did you decided to be a spice?"

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

The story must spring from an impression or perception pressing enough to have made the writer write. It should magnetize the imagination and give pleasure.

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

In the songs that I write, that's where I get to be really brave and outspoken.

It’s about time a 55-year-old British woman is the heroine of an action movie. I may have to write it.

[Doing a bilingual album] helped artistically because whenever I got bored of writing in English, I would write in Spanish. It's always cool when you have the choice.

Writing is a way to shape out visible and invisible, in myself as well as in the world.

Time for the FUTURE!! We will see young scientists in the future writing D++ (DNA Code).