Writing Quotes

Another thing that's good about writing to describe a situation or a state of consciousness is that you can finally get it right. That was my intention, and that's always interesting.

I have offices all over the place and I avoid work everywhere. I don't like to write - I like to be finished.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

I get some letters from girls that if their mothers knew what they were writing me in these letters, they'd get their butts whipped.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.

In dramatic writing, the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed-psychologically, maybe even physically.

I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

A lot of the hip hop artists don't write music. They write words.

I ask you to write this deeply into your souls . . . the materialistic culture . . . is now on the way to its close.

I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

Don't waste time looking for a better pencil: learn to write better.

When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes 10 hours a day, your mind starts going to strange places.

Jihad amongst the Muslims today has become like a taboo subject that is discussed over coffee. The one who writes and speaks about Jihad has not even spent a minute in the battlefield.

We teach reading, writing and math by [having students do] them. But we teach democracy by lecture.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

People call me for the ballads. Apparently that's where I've been pigeonholed. But it's really interesting and really fun. It's my favourite part of the job, writing.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

I understand English; I read and write English perfectly, but the accent won't go away.

It isn't easy to live after death. It takes a lifetime.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

Writing 'We Are Never Getting Back Together' was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally.

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

One of the problems with writing a cookbook is that recipes exist in the moment.

Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, comes from clear thinking. Think simple.

Hemingway was very sparse in his writing. Kris Kristofferson is like that. He can take four words and say it all.

I do not over-intellectualize the production process. I try to keep it simple: Tell the damned story.

Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.

You don't write a book to show off.

Songwriting never gets old. There's always stuff to write about.

Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control.

I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

He who speaks, he who writes is above all one who speaks on behalf of all those who have no voice.

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

Writing is basically a job for people who like punching themselves in the face, I’m pretty sure.