Writing Quotes

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

The best style is the style you don't notice.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

A simple style is like white light. Although complex, it does not appear to be so.

I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Characters aren't a fling. They aren't a one-night stand. Getting to know them takes time and hard work. It takes excessive free writes and multiple experiments.

I don't believe we can get very far, with leaders who write off half the nation as a bunch of victims who never take responsibility for their own lives.

I'm widest awake as a writer doing something new, engaged in a process I'm not sure I can finish, generating at the edge of my powers. Some people bungee jump; I write.

Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

Agile methods derive much of their agility by relying on the tacit knowledge embodied in the team, rather than writing the knowleadge down in plans.

I never learned to read or write music. Never wanted to fool with scales. That was boring, forced. The music I heard was free - flowing.

I usually write songs when I'm in a car by myself and it's usually dangerous because I'm writin' and drivin' at the same time.

You're writing it is how you feel. And when you're finished you put your signature on it and you mail it off and that's it. And that's how "Stand By Me" was really.

Similarly, although we use prepositional phrases when we write, we apparently don't write more effectively when we can label our language in these ways.

Writers have no real area of expertise. They are merely generalists with a highly inflamed sense of punctuation.

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?

I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.

I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity.

If I had more time I would write a shorter letter.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

Perhaps the act of writing is necessary when nothing happens.

No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.

Writing is the action of thinking, just as drawing is the action of seeing and composing music is the action of hearing.

I'm addicted to creating and writing.

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.

We all now tell stories by cutting from one dramatic scene to the next, whereas Victorian novelists felt free to write long passages of undramatic summary.

I grew up writing about the paranormal, and I blame too many Saturday mornings watching Scooby Doo.

...decide for yourself what makes you truly happy and then organize your life around it. Write down your goals and make plans to achieve them.

A PhD in Mathematics is three years of guessing it wrong, plus one week of getting it right and writing a dissertation.

The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.

As Im writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.

I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

Beware of advice-even this.

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

Could I write all, the world would turn to stone.

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

Unless I write every day, I don't feel I deserve my dinner.

I'm trying to write for people my age. And my inspiration over the years has changed dramatically.

Music actually meant something when I started doing it. Too bad I wasn't mature enough to write anything that meant anything.

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.