Writing Quotes

Whenever you write on a subject that questions the status quo, there are bound to be many who wrestle with the issues

The challenge of nonfiction is keeping the attention of a reader over span of time, and to keep the quality of the writing as high as it needs to be to keep people's attention.

I will write with honesty and feeling.

I have no interest in writing, directing or producing.

It was okay for people to write negative things about me just as long as they spelled my name right.

I write the books I want to read. I'm interested in seeing what happens with this book in the marketplace.

Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

I talk out the lines as I write them.

I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic.

I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion.

If you ask 20 different readers why they read, they will all be right.

The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.

Artists who write songs... what they're going through usually comes through in their music.

You just write one word and that tells you what the next word is going to be.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution.

What you write chooses you.

What I want to write about has changed somewhat, and the scope of the storytelling has changed accordingly.

There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.

Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

They think written words are even more powerful,’ whispered the toad. ‘They think all writing is magic. Words worry them. See their swords? They glow blue in the presence of lawyers.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.

I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing.

What I've always said was, hang in there, let me write what I want to write, and you'll probably like it.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

When Emily Dickinson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she reminds us, as the birds do, of the liberation and pragmatism of belief.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.

When I write, I put one foot in front of the other. It's an act of faith. I just follow my heart.

I write as a witness to what I have seen.

I don't set boundaries for myself when I am writing; if I did, I would be paralyzed from the start, unable to write a word on the page.

Just because I write in the first person doesn't mean that all my songs are autobiographical.

I feel like the songs that I write are best when they are performed by an ensemble, rather than by one solo instrument.

I've certainly collaborated with others for their songs and it's fun. To me, it's exciting to write from a place that doesn't have to be so true to my life and is more just storytelling.

I much prefer to work with dead writers, and ones who were writing four hundred years ago.

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

The appeal of writing a romance was that I'd never written one before the The Thorn and The Blossom.

I loved writing something I'd never written before, and I wanted to write not just about "true love" but also a human relationship.

Writing is an art like other arts. Dancers don't dance every once in a while. Musicians don't stop practicing. They are dedicated to what they do.

Theodore Dreiser Should ought to write nicer.

Dreiser wanted to write the next great American novel, and his desperation pervades [ Sister Carrie ] like an unsavory pit stain.

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.