Writing Quotes

Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future.

A mortgaged home, an empty stomach and a ragged back know no party. We will live to write the epitaphs of the old parties: "Died of general debility, old age, and chronic falsehoods."

Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught.

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.

The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

Men are thinking, writing, and creating, because women were pouring their energy into those men; women are not creating culture because they are occupied with love.

Always write your ideas down however silly or trivial they might seem. Keep a notebook with you at all times.

I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.

In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing. Here it is. Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.

Let us have integrity and not write checks with our tongues which our conduct cannot cash.

Writing is the painting of the voice.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.

To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.

Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

If you write enough musicals you pretty much have a sense of where they should go, what you'll need, and when; how to pull people on that journey.

A dream becomes a goal the moment you write it down. A goal becomes a plan the moment you break it down into doable steps. A plan becomes a reality only when you take action.

You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

I probably have not killed anyone in America because I write, I've maintained good controls over myself by writing.

The only lesson is, you gotta keep at it.

Buffon said unreservedly, "Genius is simply patience carried to the extreme." To those who asked how he achieved fame he replied: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my writing desk."

In order for you to be yourself, you have to be somebody first.

I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.

Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child

One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.

We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.

Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

Write what you like; there is no other rule.

It's just writing about things, feelings, not that we're dark or depressed...just as much as anyone else is.

On my tombstone just write, 'The sorest loser that ever lived.'

Germany is an anatomical oddity: it writes with its left hand and acts with its right.

Writing a story is like going down a path in the woods. You follow the path. You don't worry about getting lost. You just go.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home.

I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.

I believe in the moment of things and fate and things happening for a reason, so I write things down and I trust it.

When I was young, when I started to write, we were totally convinced that literature was a kind of weapon.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.