Writing Quotes

It's now expected of me that I will defy expectation, so I really generally seem to be free to write what I want.

I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow I keep myself sane.

Then, rising with Aurora's light, The Muse invoked, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline.

The translators of the Bible were masters of an English style much fitter for that work than any we see in our present writings; the which is owing to the simplicity that runs through the whole.

I'm happy to write 10 times too much music.

A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living.

I can't start writing until I have a closing line.

When I read something saying I've not done anything as good as 'Catch-22' I'm tempted to reply, 'Who has?'

I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me.

It ought to be a crime for any woman to have children that writes books.

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.

I do think that there's art that is tortured, but I prefer art that has the joy in it.

I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience.

Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves.

I stop and think before I start a new book and ask myself do I really want to spend the next year or two or three with these characters because if I don't, then I shouldn't be writing about them.

I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.

Black child poverty is higher. As I write in the epilogue, "Yes we can. No he didn't. President [Barack] Obama didn't push black people backward, but he missed the opportunity to move us forward."

I'm not singing anymore; that is why I am so pleased to be writing. My daughter said, "You just found a different way of using your voice."

I love making movies. I love writing. I love acting. I love it, and I feel really blessed to be able to actually make a living with something I love doing.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.

It is difficult not to write satire.

I'm writing from a place of - a center of authenticity, somewhere that only I know how to write from.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

Don't just write a to-do list write a to-be list.

When I don't make any progress, it is because I have bumped into the wall of language. Then I draw back with a bloody head. And would like to go on.

My request that my writing be read twice has aroused great indignation. Unjustly so. After all, I do not ask that they be read once.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

You can say or write anything about me you like. Just don't, for any reason, ever tell the truth.

You have to write badly to write at all. If it's crappy, I will rewrite it later. But it will be mine. You can hear the resonance of an artist who goes into herself.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

I write very rarely. Only, in fact, when the sheet of paper suffers an existential crisis and threatens, if I don't surrender to it, to bury me alive under its whiteness.

I got so anxious sitting in the make-up chair for hours with my face covered. I had my doctor write a prescription for valium. I couldn't have done it without the pill.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

It pains me even now, even a million years later, to write about such human misbehaviour. A million years later, I feel like apologizing for the human race. That’s all I can say.

If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

Let people return to making knots on ropes, instead of writing.

I write what I write and I honestly don't care if it gets on or not. I'm writing to see if I can find out some of what I think about any number of situations. I work it out in the writing.

I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.

People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.

I feel sometimes that I'm in a constant state of being lost in translation, and I guess that why I write songs.

Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write

But, George and Steven asked me to write the Indiana Jones sequels, and I didn't want to.