Writing Quotes

When there's writing that you really trust, it's very freeing as an artist.

I'm used to writing short stories, which is primarily what I like to read.

I write books that seem more suitable for children, and that's OK with me. They are a better audience and tougher critics. Kids tell you what they think, not what they think they should think.

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, 'Okay. Okay. I'll come.'

For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.

In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there's no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

People write negatives things, cause they feel that's what sells. Good news to them, doesn't sell.

One of the things that happens in novels it's almost like a continual debate with yourself. That's why you're writing the book. It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.

Now, what sort of person would write a scene where a young man stumbles upon a castle full only of beautiful young women? Answer: ME!

The best work is done with the heart breaking, or overflowing.

I said to [Lionel] Richie, "Man, my wife says you must really respect women because you write such beautiful love songs."

If you're going to have someone win because of their story, go write a screenplay about your life.

I write in my sleep. I don't know how, but I'll work on a song, go to sleep and it's finished when I wake up.

Write your own part. It is the only way I've gotten anywhere. It is much harder work, but sometimes you have to take destiny into your own hands.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Nasr combines in his writing audacious intellectual criticism, deep understanding of Islam... and a commitment to the Western-European contributions to the emancipation of the human condition.

When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves.

My main interests right now are to publish, to write, to explicate various views which I hope have an impact on thinking people.

All my writing has been an effort to sort out the paradoxes of my life.

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

You need more than a beginning if you're going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you've written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

I'm writing for those people in Kenya, but in Irvine and in New York.

I wanted to write rather than do anything else. But 'cause I left school at 15, I didn't know what a noun was, still don't.

Someone's writing down your mistakes, someone's documenting your downfall.

All writers are thieves; theft is a necessary tool of the trade.

I start with the joke line and write backward.

It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

I do indeed write on the road. My laptop goes with me everywhere.

I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Publishers don't nurse you; they buy and sell you.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

I'm not a great writer. I'm a great rewriter.

I have always wanted to write in such a way that will make people think, Why, I've always thought that but never found the words for it.

Some people are going to be impatient no matter what. If I wrote two books a year, someone out there would be pissed I wasn't writing three.

I never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

I don't know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn't have to. But it is a compulsion. You don't choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.

Golf is a game in which you yell "for," shoot six, and write down five.

The monotony of staying in one place is the best thing for writing a novel. Having regular habits, a kind of security, but especially no big surprises, no shocks.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

The hack songwriter will write the absolute truth every single word, whether it makes a great song or not.