Writing Quotes

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.

With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs'.

God writes spiritual Mysteries on our heart, where they wait silently for discovery.

Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves - the areas set aside in law for African occupation - as early as 1959 and 1960.

It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.

The ultimate 20-year plan is to be living in the Caribbean, writing, living off the land, eating from the ocean and probably smoking herb.

You can never know too much about writing. If you think you know everything, you're not leaving yourself open to learn. . . . The best writers are always learning, exploring, and trying to improve.

I don't write songs, songs write me. ... Writing a song can be agony or ecstasy. It can take half an hour or half a year. ... The popular song is America's greatest ambassador.

Write me up for 125, poster my face wanted dead or alive. Take my license all that jive, I can't drive 55.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

To read, write, and converse in due proportions, is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

I was looking at a lot of experimental writers, and I was very intrigued by short-short fiction, writers who would write little things, what I call buttons now, little vignettes.

I say I drownin' in river. She don't look me like I'm crazy but say, If you just sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat carry you to the other side. (97)

I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.

Readers soon tire of prefaces, and skip them, and so the labor of writing them is lost.

A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

Some people can sit down and write a song, but they can't go on stage like I can.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

Sometimes the most exciting journey you can make is through your own imagination.

Writing is very different to having your photo taken. You are exposing yourself more, not physically but emotionally.

If you're going to write something, that's going to be read by people, a lot of people, you hope it will not only entertain them but maybe do them some good in some way.

Stupidity is no excuse of not thinking.

Every bush can burn if you fire it with your imagination.

Each juggler should be trained in the ignorance of the laws of physics.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

People who say they read more write better.

You don't sit down and write a wish list about the person you are going to fall violently in love with. It just doesn't work like that.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at dinner wind up in bed?

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Despite my own doubts of being marketable or crushworthy, my goal was to write a record of peppy pop songs, hopefully without annoying anybody.

We're not on a desperate mission to write chart compatible stuff.

Friendship, obligation and greed are not good enough reasons to write anything.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

Greg Trooper writes great songs, including one of my very favorite songs in the world, Little Sister. On top of all that, there's his voice - an instrument I have coveted for 15 years.

Writers think in metaphors. Editors work in metaphors. A great reader reads in metaphors.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Yoga introduced me to a style of meditation. The only meditation I would have done before would be in the writing of songs.

I like to write about things that are extreme in some form. I like to write about something I feel I have to write about.

A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized.

I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly.

Taking the question in general, I should say, in the case of many poets, that the most important thing for them to do ... is to write as little as possible

I do all these various activities like painting and writing, comedy and films probably because not that I'm good at everything but because I'm not good at any of these things.