Writing Quotes

Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.

I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.

We are the only ones who can tell our stories because we are the only ones who have lived them.

A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.

Forget about writing to Penthouse. This one was going to be a story for their grandkids.

It's striking how commercially viable that impulse for instant intimacy is right now, especially in songs and writing.

Art is borne out of necessity. Music is a tool and men are doers. When a relationship is working, you don't need to write a song-you need to get toilet paper.

I write because I'm a writer. It is rather like cooking: to make something out of the raw material at hand.

It takes a lot of good songs to write a great song!

If I'd succeeded right away at acting I wouldn't have sought out writing.

I'm astounded by people who take eighteen years to write something. That's how long it took that guy to write Madame Bovary, and was that ever on the best-seller list?

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

Eventually writing became more interesting to me than acting.

I've learned to allow myself the room to fall in love with what I'm writing.

Very depressed today. Unable to write a thing. Menacing gods. I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.

I feel terribly vulnerable and 'not-myself' when I'm not writing.

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

England offers new comforts. I could write a novel there.

The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down.

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

I'm happier writing about doctors than I would have been being one.

One need not write in a diary what one is to remember for ever.

I want to write songs and play them for people - live.

I think I approach all of my writing in the same way. I mean, it's my job, and I'm committed to it. I don't just float around and wait for some muse to call.

Stuff that I write isn't as similar to the stuff that I'm in, but I don't really care, I just do comedy.

For most people who write, writing is a compulsion. If I could be healed of it, I would, and I think a lot of people who write feel the same way.

There is a difference between writing and being an author. Authors talk. I'm standing here talking now. This has nothing to do with writing.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.

I write from my point of view.

I like to write music that I feel like I would listen to. It's like my interpretation of what I want to hear.

They ask me what I'm writing for - I'm writing to show you what we're fighting for.

Everybody could write, deejay, rap. Everybody could do it all.

I think in a lot of ways, writing, when you're really in there, is like being an actress because you're in somebody else's head.

As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

Starting writing is stressful and scary and hard, but also, it's just like going to the gym. You're just stiff and weird, and you can't do it as well.

With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.

I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people.