Writing Quotes

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

My first gig, I was about 17 or 18. But I'd been singing a long time. I got a guitar when I was 8, and started trying to write songs as a teenager.

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

I just don't write musically, but lyrically, yeah I write.

I'm sick of being known as the sexy guy that writes great songs.

You don't have to be as good a writer to write a song; it's a very different process to writing straight prose. To learn how to write prose takes a lot of years of practice.

I just never really thought of not being involved, because when I write the songs I take them to a certain place and by that point I kinda know what I want them to sound like.

Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Save the gerund and screw the whale.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

When you're writing‚ you're conjuring. It's a ritual‚ and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.

I came in with a completely new perspective. I would write songs and they would pick tunes they felt were in the Purple vein.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Don't try to write through it, to force it. Many do, but that won't work. Just wait, it will come.

When you set a goal, write it down and then it's like making a promise to yourself.

When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it.

There's a side to this industry that nurtures divas who can't write. It's a big business.

I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.

You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.

I really love writing themes and melody.

Speaking, writing, and discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding require total committment.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

That's not writing, that's typing

When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around.

I started writing because it was about making my friends laugh, and when you're talking to your friends, you can't bullshit.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments.

In language that's lyrical and haunting, Cheryl Strayed writes about bliss and loss, about the kind of grace that startles and transforms us in ordinary moments.

Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.

If you're a fiction writer, though, I can tell you how to let people talk through you. Listen. Just be quiet, and listen. Let the character talk. Don't censor, don't control. Listen, and write.

I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.

The only thing that a man may do that is new, is to write himself on human hearts.

I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.

I have obsessed about my weight in some sort of way all my life. I used to write in my journal what I weighed every day.

As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

There's just a deeper level of sophistication in the writing of female characters on TV.

That's why, when Alias came along, I knew I'd be OK if the show was on for five or six years because the writing was so good and the creative team was so strong.

Maybe I should write 'Tiger Who?' on my cap.

if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

There was a day when I liked writing letters -- it has gone. Unfortunately the passion for getting them remains.