Writing Quotes

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

I get the music, I get the beats. And I go to the studios and write the lyrics.

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Give me coffee! I'm going to write!

I like men who paint or write or do something creative.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

Now I'm doing a film festival for kids and writing a script about a kidnapped journalist in Afghanistan.

Writing is the beast unto itself.

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day.

I watched TV religiously when I was a kid, but nowadays - with the Internet - there's so many people writing about TV on the Internet, that everything's sort of under a magnifying glass.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

It got so bad that by the time I was graduated, the only reading I did was in order to get the grade and the only writing I did was in order to get the grade.

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

It's my job, too, to keep up with pop culture and what the kids are into 'cause you don't want to sound like an old man trying to write for kids. I spend a lot of my time spying on them.

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

I didn't choose to write a military man as much as Vince Haven chose me.

Don't worry about never having time to write. Just write what you can in the time you do have and give yourself a big clap on the back, followed by a double latte and a blueberry muffin.

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete.

We read often with as much talent as we write.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.

I really tend to write in retrospect.

Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.

Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading.

I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.

When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.

How to feel your way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of your skull.

My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are.

I want to write music that will outlive me.