Writing Quotes

I actually have a young readers' series that I wanna do, kind of in the same lane as a Harry Potter or Narnia or Twilight. I want to write stuff like that.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

I'm not a dictator who writes things to tell people what to do.

Since I stopped writing, I read more than ever. Other people's words, not my own - my words are gone.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

Did you hear that we're writing Iraq's new Constitution? Why not just give them ours? We're not using it anymore.

My ear is not working, my poetry ear. I can't write a line that doesn't sound like pots and pans falling out of the cupboard.

I always try to use my medium, and if I get into a normal sitcom-writing contest with normal sitcom writers, I'm going to lose.

Every hour you spend writing is an hour you don't spend worrying about your writing.

I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.

The greatest rules of dramatic writing are conflict, conflict, conflict.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

It's not an idea until you write it down.

A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing.

I love to write. It's my first love.

Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years.

Many people - and I think I am one of them - are more productive when they've had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I'm far better able to write.

I have to feel something emotionally on the story to be able to write for it. I turn things down if I don't feel I'm really right to tell that particular story.

I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.

If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.

What is an artist? He's a man who has antennae, who knows how to hook up to the currents which are in atmosphere, in the cosmos.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

The guitar is my favorite and the one, I guess, I'm best at. But I play enough of the different instruments to be able to write with them and to, hopefully, to make myself look impressive on stage.

Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

Without writing, what would I have become? Nothing. In China the individual used to be treated as a screw or a small cog in the revolutionary machine. I wanted to be a human being with a voice.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

I am not a good enough writer to have an agenda or come up with a message and try to put it into a song. It's more like you write what comes to you... You try to reflect the mood of the songs.

Things like guitars and ukuleles, you should never part with it, because there will probably be good, healthy times spent, just playing and writing.

I write for the still, small possibility of justice.

[My mother] is much more musical, and by the time I started writing songs - by the time I was about 17 - she started to believe in me, musically.

I don't want to write without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

I have just put my soul as a blank into the hand of Jesus, my Redeemer, and desired Him to write on it what He pleases; I know it will be His image.

I did meet Mickey Mouse in California, and he seems to be writing the Labour party's economic policy at the moment.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

Time can't be managed. I merely manage activities. Each night, I write down on a sheet of paper a list of the things I have to accomplish the next day. And when I wake up ... I do them.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.