Writing Quotes

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote.

I would never write about anyone who is not at the end of his rope.

If you go to a big city anywhere in the world and you need a doctor, just ask me. I can tell you who's good and who's bad. I've even considered writing a guidebook.

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.

It's immoral that people make money out of writing crap, but I try not to obsess about it. I don't want to spend my life being angry.

When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.

Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

It's beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start writing is like leaping into a cold lake.

Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.

I just want to write. It's like once I get those obsessive thoughts out of my head, once they're written down, they're somehow set free and I can move on.

A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

I simply write what I want, wish, long to write.... The state of human life and the god or demon within. The constant internal war that being alive can conjure.

Remember that the writing itself is good for you. If your story is so close to home that you are afraid to write it, it probably means you need to write it.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

My dad is adorably optimistic, positive, pie-in-the-sky. He thinks every new song I write is my best. He sells T-shirts at my merchandise stands and hands out guitar picks to fans.

I'm so lucky that I get to write my own music and write my own stories, so every single time I look down in the audience and I see somebody singing the words back to me, it makes it all worth it.

It's pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about.

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write; but how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me, Excepting Original Sin.

As soon as a thought darts, I write it down.

I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.

As you get older you're told to be sensible, but it's important for writing if you're a comic that you're able to still access that childlike thing.

I'm guessing the stress of having to write for a deadline can be inspiring. Sometimes, pressure is good.

Don't be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable.

Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.

You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels.

I expect that in 40 years' time I'll be writing political tomes and working for an organisation like Oxfam.

I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me

They say poets write mostly for themselves; if anyone else likes it, well and good, if not, it doesn't matter; certainly, not to me.

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.

Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

If I have an idea, I write it down, although I usually carry a little dictation machine with me because I'm too lazy to write

People have to be given permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do.

I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people, but not for me. I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench. I felt right at home.

I've been writing on my own. It's like Roger Miller used to say, every now and then, like a dog having puppies, you have to crawl under the house and do it yourself.

Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.