Writing Quotes

I think the complaint that I hear most often from kids, even kids who like to write is that don't know what to write about. A journal is a great source of story starters.

Writing is this act of faith - a bit like driving in the fog: you can hardly see just in front of you. But you trust God's leading you and you just write into the space you can see ahead of you.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.

What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.

I have two writer daughters, and a psychoanalyst daughter, and a lawyer daughter, and they wish we didn't write, I'm sure, but we write. If we were a painting family, we would paint.

Many writers do write about their families and their immediate loved ones and love experiences, either as children or as adults. And very often people get offended by it.

Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

On Twitter, when someone would die, I would write a joke. Or if there's a tragedy, I would write a joke and tweet it. That was my thing, and then at a certain point, people started demanding it.

I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes—when we write small to say something big.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

The critics suppose that it is easy to write a play. They aren't aware that writing a good play is difficult and writing a bad one is twice as hard.

Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is towrite, and only to write.

If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.

When I look at commercial studios, I think, "Oh, they're all so nice and tidy," but it's because they don't actually write music in them.

I don't just strictly sample. I build. I'm a musician: I play piano and drums, I read notes, I write music.

I procrastinate, and I push writing to the last available moment, because I don't like to settle on anything. I guess you can call it indecision or you can call it holding out for inspiration.

The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.

One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors.

I'm working when I'm fighting with my wife. I constantly ask myself-how can I use this stuff to literary advantage.

I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!

People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion.

You have to stop living in order to write.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

We live in the age of mass loquacity.We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur.

All novelists write in a different way, but I always write in longhand and then do two versions of typescript on a computer.

Songwriting is a mysterious art. When I sit down to write a song, the end result should be mysterious and have this dark quality.

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

I never really tell anyone what I'm writing beforehand because I usually don't know what it will be.

The writing of a poem is, for me, in the first place, an almost total act of abandon leading to discovery leading to recognition.

I love to write songs and sing them, and I didn't really know much more than that. Somehow it's gotten to the point where a friend can say, "It's very you," and that made me feel good.

I don't feel like writing any more ghost stories.

Of one thing the reader can be certain: the more easily anything reads, the harder it has been to write.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

Lovers do all the talking and writing. What are the Beloveds thinking?

Never lie in writing.