Writing Quotes

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.

Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without memories.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.

My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

I miss the days when I was alone with my characters and no one else knew them except me.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

I like prefaces. I read them. Sometimes I do not read any further.

The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.

What I don't write is as important as what I write.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Writing is a lonely business.

I would hope that my writing's cleaner than it was when I started.

If my writing comes to a halt, I head to the shops: I find them very inspirational. And if I get into real trouble with my plot, I go out for a pizza with my husband.

Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.

But I'm so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it's just so slow, I'm so terribly slow using it.

I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song.

I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.

I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.

If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

You can get too bogged down in technology and you can sort of forget what it is you were trying to do. And with the Pet Shop Boys it's primarily about the songs, it's about song writing.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better.

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

Even when I'm in quite a happy state of mind, I like writing really sad songs. I think a lot of people do.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

As an actor, my main focus is finding good writing and attacking a good role.