Writing Quotes

When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.

I love my work but do not know how I write it.

I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record.

I feel much more comfortable in politics than I did in book writing. Book writing is so hard. Politics felt easy compared to that.

Experience belongs to the actor, but the story belongs to the teller. We write so we will never forget.

I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.

Anytime that I've felt uninspired, I don't force myself to sit down and write. I only do it when I feel the impulse.

I like photography and I write; I also write music. One day I would like to direct [films] as well.

I've always been a writer, and in high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and I got a writing scholarship. It's always been a passion of mine.

I always loved writing as a tool of expression.

Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.

Every time an adult is going to write something for a teenager and you don't have, physically, a person who is that, you are always going to be a little off.

The only reason I would write a break-up song is because my own problem of allowing myself to relate to people.

I'll write and make chords with my voice sometimes if I don't have an instrument even though it takes a million times longer.

For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working.

I am an avid reader! As for writing, I might - someday. But we'll have to wait and see.

The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively.

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man, Or the man who’s half a boy.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

Saepa stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturas. (Turn the stylus [to erase] often if you would write something worthy of being reread.)

Inspiration for what we produce comes from reading, observing the world of humans around us and also the animal kingdom

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

Maugham then offers the greatest advice anyone could give to a young author: "At the end of an interrogation sentence, place a question mark. You'd be surprised how effective it can be.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

... when editors were flattered, they would sometimes give in on some of their mad ideas.

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!

There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.