Writing Quotes

If someone can write great music... Paul McCartney is a genius. He's so prolific. All we should do is bow down to Paul McCartney.

I am sorry for people who can't write letters. But I suspect also that you and I ... love to write them because it's kind of like working without really doing it.

Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

I'd rather write about laughing than crying, For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.

There are some people who have been reading me for years, and they keep saying kind things about the writing. That's what you're writing for, to get people to respond to it.

You write some material, go up on stage and try it out; go back home and throw it in the trash can. And the next day do it again.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

I just write what comes to me. I didn't sit down and say ok, here is my statement. It's just a song that has a shout out.

Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.

To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

The best writing is certainly when you are in love

. . . if [writing] lift you from your feet with the great voice of eloquence, then the effect is to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men; . . .

He writes nothing whose writings are not read.

Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

Persevere. Plan. Strategize. Focus. Breathe. Write. Let go: relax. Forgive. All this failing: take a nap.

The artist writes, paints, sings or dances the burden of some idea or feeling off his mind.

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.

I only write when listening to the music.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.

[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.

Don't ever let anyone else write your story for you.

The hardest thing about writing is writing.

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

I think writing is a much more personal thing.

Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.

Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.

Writing is the hardest work in the world not involving heavy lifting.

... if they [your children] write their names in the dust on the furniture, don't let them put the year.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.

I have a writing addiction.

Ah, you're the one who wrote the letter. So you can write then.

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to.

I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.

I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic pleasure to write. If my work pleases the few I am gratified. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret.

He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public.

You fail only if you stop writing.

The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potholder.

I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entrepreneur in order to keep my magazine going.