Writing Quotes

Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.

I write from my stomach.

A limited vocabulary, but one with which you can make numerous combinations, is better than thirty thousand words that only hamper the action of the mind.

The Internet is no longer the kind of thing where only six guys in the world can build it. Now, you can write a couple of checks and get one of your own.

I used to write things that might have sounded better coming out of an older person's voice or vision. Hence, "grandpa-boy." I'm an old man, but I'm a boy. A really old boy!

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

If Shakespeare had been in pro basketball, he never would have had time to write his soliloquies. He would have always been on a plane between Phoenix and Kansas City.

That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.

I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.

Books are not about messages. I write to understand my soul

I would like to emphasize again that right prayer leads to right action, that faith without works is dead. An excellent way to put thoughts into action is to write a letter for peace.

I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies, but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free, and then I correct it after.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Before you approach a production entity or even a potential producer, you should write up a treatment and register your show with the Writers Guild of America.

I rely heavily on rhythm when I write. You should tap your foot when you read it, all the way through.

If certain Critics were as clearsighted as they are malignant, how great would be the benefit to be derived from their writings!

Songwriting is best. It's the hardest ... finest ... tightest. It also requires the most discipline.

I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.

Stop it now and take control. Write this on a card and pin it up where you can see it... MY THOUGHTS CONTROL MY LIFE!

My abilities grow with each job, whether it's writing or directing. When I stop learing, I'll stop working

Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr's The Windward Road.

Whenever something good happens, write it down. Buy a special notebook . . . and use it to list all the good in your life.

You talk about auteur de cinema having things in their heads and putting them all across, can you imagine Shakespeare writing screenplays?

But, right now, the situation is that almost all of my writing is out of print.

I'm much happier just to write myself out of the script entirely.

Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.

Voice really depends on the answer to the question, Who is telling this story? . . . That will color your diction-and determine your metaphors, your sensibility.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.

My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.

I write fiction and I'm told it's autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.

I have a real aversion to sentimentality, but I also really want to write about love and friendship.

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning.

The less conscious one is of being a writer, the better the writing.

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there.

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.

I just started writing and writing for people. And then, like I guess after (a) year of getting some placements, I kinda got a shot to be an artist. Long story short I think, yeah.

He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink.

Literature is both my joy and my comfort: it can add to every happiness and there is no sorrow it cannot console.

A piece of writing has to seduce the reader; it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader's trust.

I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job.

I don't write to give joy to readers but to give them a conscience.

Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!

Some day I'll write a book and call it 'How I Got the Nickname Pumpsie' and sell it for one dollar, and if everybody who ever asked me that question buys the book, I'll be a millionaire.

I'm not writing novels, the screenplays are my novels, so I'm gonna write it the best that I can. If the movie never gets made, it'd almost be okay because I did it. It's there on the page.

Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.