Writing Quotes

I have been writing now for over a week. I find it cleansing, refreshing; it is good for me.” (p.531)

Just write what you love and what a movie you'd like to see.

It's quite difficult to write about photography as a photographer. A lot of better photographers than me have declined to do it.

Some PhD physicists write software or work for hedge funds, but physics still has a problem with having very smart people but not enough opportunities.

Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Give yourself time to get better.

Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.

You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.

Writing isn't about the destination-writing is the journey that transforms the soul and gives meaning to all else.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts.

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.

I don't analyze too much, because then I'll question, 'Why do I write down all of these random little phrases?'

I asked Mr. Vann which O levels you need to write situation comedy for television. Mr. Vann said that you don't need qualifications at all, you just need to be a moron.

To be honest, I don't know. I started one [book] back in 1982 or '83 when I first retired. But I was only 25 or 26 and not ready to write my memoirs.

You're not just writing in a vacuum, and then handing it over to someone else to shoot. You're writing, and then getting feedback from the actor and hearing their voice and how they play things.

I very rarely sit down with a guitar and try to write a song. I usually think about it a lot and then I'll try to re-create what was in my head at the time.

This is the life I live, and this is the stuff I experience. And like any good writer, I should just write about what goes in my life and what goes on around me. So that's what I chose to do.

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write.

When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

I don't really think of writing as a career. It's something that happened to me. By working harder than I knew it was possible to work, I have become passable at it.

Poets find truth by writing about what they love.

I write about the men you want to read about but don't necessarily want to be married to.

Everybody won’t like everything you write. Some people won’t like anything you write. Get over it.

E-mail creates the illusion that you're writing. You're not.

I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean?

I am glad I worked on a newspaper because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or not.

Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.

Speaking as a writer, I'm not interested in trends, I want to write books that are honest, with characters as true to the inner world of the story as I can make them.

I got addicted to the addiction book. I actually started developing all the addictions of the people in the book that I was writing about, without realizing it.

Thinking, writing are ultimately questions of stamina.

...what I write is smarter than I am. Because I can rewrite it.

I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.

Norman Mailer in his writings is ultimately more concerned with success than with danger; danger is only a means to success.

A great writer has all 4 - but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

I write - and talk - in order to find out what I think.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.

When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.

When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.

I'm more cautious about what I write.

Some of the exuberance of my essay-writing has gone because I'm worried about the uses they could serve.