What Is Writing Quotes

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

I wasn't inspired so much by a person as by reading many good books. I loved to write and I wondered if I might be able to write material that others would enjoy reading.

I write a song because I want to. I think the moment you start writing it to make money, you're starting to kill yourself artistically.

I have come to understand that life is too complex and much too short to let amateurs direct the story. I would rather let the Master Storyteller do the writing.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

If the stuff you're writing is not for yourself, it won't work.

If I'm doing my job right, then I'm not writing the dialogue; the characters are saying the dialogue, and I'm just jotting it down.

I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't.

This letter gives me a tongue; and were I not allowed to write, I should be dumb. [Lat., Praebet mihi littera linguam: Et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero.]

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can animate even the most tired and tedious text.

If say 90% of Christian marriages were intact, people would be writing about it.

Write yourself a permission slip to be surprised by someone's potential. Who knows? One day that person could be you.

Writing is very much like bricklaying. You learn to put one brick on top of another and spread the mortar so thick.

Writers are the engineers of human souls.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

Writing is a solitary occupation.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

Literature is painting, architecture, and music.

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

I write of the wish that comes true--for some reason, a terrifying thought.

I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets -- dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion.

When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar.

I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of work of fiction should be to tell a story.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

Writing is both mask and unveiling.

The cool thing about writing music, writing anything, is that once you publish it, it's there forever.

I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.