Writing Quotes

Writing wasn't easy and wasn't fun. It was hard and lonely, and the words seldom just flowed.

Finding a voice that your readers will enjoy is largely a matter of taste. Saying that isn't much help-taste is a quality so intangible that it can't even be defined. But we know it when we meet it.

A simple [writing] style is the result of very hard work.

Writing is no respecter of blueprints.

Journalism is writing that first appears in any periodic journal.

You learn to write by writing.

I would much rather not be the center of attention, and I'd much rather travel and be writing my novel, rather than standing on a stage and trying to get people to understand something.

Writing from a character is really fun - sometimes you can be more honest through somebody else's perspective.

A lot of artists write about the same things their whole career.

I try not get too self-aware when writing lyrics.

The only difficulty is to know what bits to choose and what to leave out. Novel-writing is not creation, it is selection.

But to write - that is grief and labor; and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it; how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.

You look at people like Gena Rowlands, but she had [John] Cassavetes to write these amazing roles for her.

Writing ... it begins as an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, then a master, and finally a tyrant.

I am sorry to have made such a long speech, but I did not have time to write a shorter one.

I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing.

I didn’t even know I could write music, but somehow Walt did. He tapped my hidden talents.

When one is writing a letter, he should think that the recipient will make it into a hanging scroll.

I write down inspirational things on cards that I keep in my bag and look at during the round.

If you write genre fiction, you follow the rules, and you have to follow them because readers expect that.

Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

While most of the music I write is instrumental, I love to use the human voice as another instrument.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

By the time you finish touring the record, everything that's exciting to me is what's ahead of me. I want to write the next paragraph.

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

Horrible that you could write in a language so well, but have nothing meaningful to say.

If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.

I've realized the most effective way to write, for me, is knowing what to throw away.

I don't write hits. If you just open that door, you're going to get a hit.

I feel like I'm still learning a lot with writing lyrics. In the beginning, like the first record, I wasn't so aware.

It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.

Except for the usual house chores, doing income tax, etc., I am free to write whenever I want.

That is one more reason why I write in English only right now. I prefer writing in the language I hear around me for the people by whom I am surrounded.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.

I've been doing musical theater since I was a kid. And look for a CD from me in the future. I want to write all the songs!

I wouldn't just have other people write songs and me go out and sing it. I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I really write emotionally so whatever mood I'm in, or if a chord hits me a certain way that's what I'll go off of.

I did theater for a few years while I was in New York, but it was tough having to perform scripts worse than what I knew I could write.

Turning water to wine? I mean c'mon, that's stupid. They should have let me write the bible.

Somebody approached me about writing a biography on me, I told them they were too late.

Dude, writing, acting and directing are such easy jobs. But to do them all as awesomely as Zach Braff does, well that... that's something.

I try to write three jokes every day. I don't sit down and write them, it's just things that pop into my head. Then I'll go watch it fail onstage that night.

The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written.

I don't want to name any names, but I've worked on television shows where there's a guy writing for my generation who's like 60 - and it doesn't work.

In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.