Writing Quotes

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

never write a line you'd be ashamed to read at your own funeral.

When you're writing, your mind has a place where the stories happen. With one word, you can get the idea of where you are.

So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don't want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.

When I write, I don't have any expectation of what kind of song it will become or who it might reach.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

When I discovered that I could write music, it felt like the most natural way for me to connect with people and tell my stories. I've always thought of that as what I do: I tell stories.

Hiring someone to write your autobiography is like hiring someone to take a bath for you

The last thing a real cop wants to do is write a ticket. That's the truth.

The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

It's hard to be someone that people talk about and write about, you know? They don't know me.

One function of the imagination in autobiographical writing is to allow the writer to try out different versions of the self.

Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.

God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.

Write what you love. Love will hold you through the hard times and hold the world during the good times.

Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

I get up early and open my emails, write cheques and answer the phone; whatever needs to be done.

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

I like to feel that every day or most days, I do a little bit of writing. I am a creature of habit in terms of the way I live.

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

Even in writing an annual report, the unconscious plays a role.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write.

I like density, not volume. I like to leave something to the imagination. The reader must fit the pieces together, with the author's discreet help.

You usually find me writing what I like to think of as intelligent summer action and genre films.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.

Nathaniel Hawthorne once said that easy reading is damn hard writing.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

I see things beyond what other people see. I am always looking for hidden corners and closets of a life that I feel aren't explored either by the person who lived it or the people writing about it.

I love directing my music videos and writing video treatments, and I think it's all just because I love the visual aspect of it as well.

Life happens, and I write about it wherever I am.

Writing is not just the technical act of your fingers on the keyboard. Writing is living.

Writing is primarily a sensuous and creative expression of life.

Personally, it's changed my game - it's how I think now. Can't imagine writing more than a paragraph in anything that doesn't do MMD.

Write good content about stuff that you love. Readers will find you.

Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.

I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.

I learn the lines that JK Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them.