Writing Quotes

When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things—as opposed to making things up—that did not quite happen.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

I can write better plays than any living danced, and dance better than any living playwright.

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.

Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.

Judging from the letters I've received from obviously feeble-minded persons who wish I would write another These Old Shades, it ought to sell like hot cakes.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.

We often hear that mathematics consists mainly of "proving theorems." Is a writer's job mainly that of "writing sentences?"

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn.

Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

Talent is long patience.

The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

The mixture of the oral and the written traditions in the writings of Plato enabled him to dominate the history of the West.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.

I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.

Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.

I write like a two-year-old and I can't spell.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.

Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

If you don’t like a language, you can go write your own.

I don't read books, I write them.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.

With many readers, brilliancy of style passes for affluence of thought; they mistake buttercups in the grass for immeasurable gold mines under ground.

Every novelist should write something for children at least once in his lifetime.

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

If I ever teach writing again, I’d say the first lesson is to listen.

One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about.

You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really.

I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

No one suggests that writing about science will turn the entire world into a model of judgment and creative thought. It will be enough if they spread the knowledge as widely as possible.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

I have the most fun writing and directing. And I always choose myself as the lead actor.

Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

How well I would write if I were not here!

When you write a song, there's no point keeping it to yourself.

All writers, I think, are to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught.