Writing Quotes

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

Writing is really freeing because it's the only part of the process where it's just you and the characters and you are by yourself in a room and you can just hash it out. There are no limitations.

It's easier to teach a poet how to read a balance sheet than it is to teach an accountant how to write.

Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in that book? If I die, will that character keep going, or will he just fade away?

I was writing before I met Rick and actually I created the band before Rick Finch. Basically, the first album, I wrote. Who's to say what would've happened? Rick was very talented too.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

Writing isn't just on the page; it's voices in the reader's head. Read what you write out loud to someone-anyone-and you will catch all kinds of things.

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique.

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.

You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else.

My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

There are two words for everything.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.

Comedy, although it is not one of the fine arts - it's a vulgar art, it's one of the people's arts, it's the spoken word, the writing that goes into it is an art form - it's certainly artistry.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

William Shakespeare sounds to me like some kind of faggot.

Rock stars are idiots. You know that! Remember this moron never went to music school, never learned music theory and can't read or write music. So why not be suspicious of everything this idiot says?

If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.

For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.

There's a level of realism you can only achieve through the imaginary.

It is the winners who write history - their way.

You already know when I'm writing, so don't be surprised if it's short and dry, because I'm too hungry to write anything fat

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

Writing [is] a form of prayer.

When they dumped all these people out of the insane asylums they didn't all go sleep in the street. Some of them moved into suburbia, and started writing postcards to the FCC.

Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.

Anytime you put yourself in a creative box, it's going to stifle you; it's not conducive to the writing or recording process.

I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute. First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.

Nothing any good isn't hard.

You can stroke people with words.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

I write every day. I don't have a writing schedule. I write when I feel like it. Fortunately I feel like it all the time. I am writing for hours.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.

Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I dont understand why this happens in the movie industry.

Write about what you don't know about what you know.

One has to live a life that creates a writer.