The Writing Life Quotes

After three straight years of writing, though, I definitely needed a break to just go live my life.

I'm going to write a whole pilot and see if anyone's interested, and if not then I'll just live out the tortured life instead of showing it on TV.

I used to do everything to keep a wall up around myself and keep my life quiet so that I could write.

I write because I want to have more than one life.

Maybe poetry's not so important, but ... it makes life worth living.

I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

- I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it. + Then you shouldn't be a writer.

Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.

Stories have the ability to take us inside all kinds of life.

I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

God calls me to write the truth of my life transparently so that others can learn from my hurt and heartache without taking the field trip themselves.

The only reason I write at all is because I am going through, and growing through, something in my life I want to share with others through my personal experiences.

I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life. You are a second away from saying it. You have no idea how much I love you.

The stuff I write isn't strictly autobiographical, but it's personal, if that makes any sense. It draws all these little incidents and people out of my life and then contorts them.

Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me.

What I need more in my culture and in my life right now is hope, and so I tend to write to that. I'll always end up bending more toward optimism.

I believe that there's a force of life in the universe, and that when we're writing or making music or painting, we're likely to connect with that flow.

I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.

I was a different person before I started to write. When I realized I could be a songwriter and that people would listen - that was when I started feeling good in my life.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

Working with somebody who has a more interesting life than I do - and getting to take on that life temporarily - is an endlessly interesting way to have the experience of writing memoir.

I just think its the changes that age brings. You slow down a little bit ... the writers are smart enough to write all those changes that life gives you.

But that isn't my life. I have said many times I don't want to be considered one who once flew fighters. That's not who I am. I devoted the subsequent 50 years - more - to writing.

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

I write about true-life type things.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

For me, drawing is a question of death and life. Every day I draw, I write, I do something.

when I talk about a writing life, I'm talking about a life in which writing is the dominant response to living.

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

What I write is very personal, but not autobiographical. It's more 'thematically personal' - what's up in my life in terms of themes at the moment.

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life.

The real fear isn't rejection, but that there won't be enough time in your life to write all the stories that you have in you.

I take something that happened to me in 1983, and I make it happen to somebody else in 1943. I pick my life apart that way, try to understand it better by writing straight through it.

Every time I write a book, I've probably taken five years off my life.

My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs write life. I decided to take her up on that.

Your life informs your writing.

In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.

Refuse to write your life and you have no life.

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

I think my parents' lives are worthy of writing about. I don't think my life is particularly worthy of writing about.

I am so territorial, that [from the start] I just felt like whatever I was gonna do I was gonna write it myself, its my personal preference to always be in control of everything I do in life.

Songs are kind of alive, I think; once you finish writing them, that doesn't mean that that's it for the song. It can have its own little life, I think.

More than anything that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.