Writing Quotes

Either you write songs or you don't. And if you do write songs like I do, I think there's a natural desire to want to make records.

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

[Write to your congressional representative against the health care reform proposal or] we will awake to find that we have socialism.

All really good picture books are written to be read five hundred times

I like to stay artistic. So I always like to draw or write.

One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written.

You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough to not think about all the things that might go wrong.

For me, songwriting is something that I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day.

I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me.

If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you've got. Just don't plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

I am writing these poems from inside a lion.

I think writing is really a process of communication. . . . It's the sense of being in contact with people who are part of a particular audience that really makes a difference to me in writing.

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

I will not write about anyplace in the world unless I've been there to personally research it

If there is writing on Hadrian's Wall, it reads that the English should leave Scotland to its own devices.

Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman.

History-writing is not a visit of condolence.

The first condition of immortality is death.

I write poems to find out why I write them

I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. I think we tend to write out our phobias.

Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.

I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.

I'm always writing. It's kind of a curse: You never stop. But I need isolation to write. So the real meat of the material comes when I'm off the road.

I don't write lyrics, the lyrics write Thom Yorke

If you asked me to write a rock song or a rap song, I couldn't do it because they're not in my fingers.

Business book writing for me is when some set of ideas gets stuck in my mind, I write a book about it. I haven't got a theory and I haven't got a framework.

I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.

I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

I've been Catholic all my life, and there's one thing I've never understood. Why didn't the Corinthians write back?

For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.

Sure, it's simple, writing for kids... Just as simple as bringing them up.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying.

Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.