Writing Quotes

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

We should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality.

To name the world in your own terms, to tell your own story, is an act of authority and power. When you write, you are saying, in effect, 'I have a voice. I have a story. This is what I have to say.'

In a way, a lot of my work is in the re-writing once it is cast, as I adapt to the rhythms of how the roles are played out by the actors.

I never claimed to be a low-maintenance gal, but when I'm writing, it's particularly challenging. I lose things constantly: my watch, my glasses, my papers, my mind.

A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

When you're playing such brilliant music every day, then the last thing you ever want to do is try to write something of your own that's crude and not as good.

When writing about transcendental issues, be transcendentally clear.

A character who is thought-out is not born, he or she is contrived. A born character is round, a thought-out character is flat.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world.

Write down the things you like most about them (don't expect change from them). Law of attraction will not put you in the same space together if you frequencies don't match.

For those you work with or interact with regularly .. get a notebook and write down positive aspects of each of those people.

Does anybody learn writing, or do they just touch someone who lets them see the power of the deleted word?

The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don't think. Don't care.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.

I'll think about things for thirty or forty years before I'll write it.

Good reading makes for damn hard writing.

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.

Don't write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn't be changed.

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.

So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy.

Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it.

I have not seen anyone assume that all the citizens of New York are guilty of murder, violence, robbery, perjury, or writing proprietary software.

Writing is?waiting for the word that may not be there until next Tuesday.

I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.

Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.

The time it would take me to write a screenplay it would take me the time to make two films. I would rather make the movies and I'm a better moviemaker than I a would be writer.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.

Writing is mainly perspiration, not inspiration.

I didn't start writing in order to express myself. If anything the opposite was true. I was just as interested in negating the I and the ego.

[Writing scripts] I'm not looking to jump in and make super mainstream movies. I still like to make movies that I like to see.

I've nothing against anyone following their dreams - but not if they're crap.

The most important lesson in the writing trade is that any manuscript is improved if you cut away the fat.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

I simply write with an intelligent reader in mind. I don't think about how old they are.