Writing Quotes

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

As an experience, madness is terrific ... and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?

Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.

There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence you recognize as the one you are looking for.

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.

Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Turning one's novel into a movie script is rather like making a series of sketches for a painting that has long ago been finished and framed.

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

I love to write humor. If I could make a living doing it that is all I would write. The happiest period of my life is when I was writing the sequels to "MASH". I was able to ridicule everyone.

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them.

But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.

I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I'm in a good mood, but I don't really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

I think I write fiction for the opportunity to get beyond the limits of my own life.

If I could only write, I'd write a nasty letter to the mayor, if he could only read.

If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.

I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies.

Being a writer was never a choice, it was an irresistible compulsion.

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

I'm a comedian so I'm not waiting around for someone to write a part for me. I don't have to wait for somebody else to create my next job; I have the ability to basically write my own ticket.

Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation.

In itself, I spent a year writing, you know all these different songs and when it came to recording the record, I just pulled out all the tracks I liked the most.

The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.

The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I couldn't decide which one to jumo into.

Nothing is new except arrangement.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

In a lot of ways, the way you're making your bread and butter is off people who aren't necessarily who you're writing for.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

The Stolen and Perverted Writings of Homer & Ovid, of Plato & Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

Some write a narrative of wars and feats, Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history.

But poverty, with most who whimper forth Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe; The effect of laziness, or sottish write.

Writing checks for charities is necessary and important. But it can't compare with corporal works of mercy, which are infinitely greater.

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

To make yourself understood you have to think plain and write plain.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description.