Writing Quotes

Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!

Well I don't write, I attempt to scribble here and there. And no, nothing ever so grand as being published.

If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Sporadic thoughts will pop into my head and I'll have to go write something down, and the next thing you know, I've written a whole song in an hour.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

I did write a letter to the archdiocese who'd banned the song, Only the Good Die Young, asking them to ban my next record.

What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.

In the Steven F. Austin Colony, which was the first colony, Texans first established a provisional government in 1835 with the intention of writing a declaration of independence soon after.

That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings.

People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

And Numenius, the Pythagorean philosopher, expressly writes: 'For what is Plato, but Moses speaking in Attic Greek.'

If you wait for inspiration to write you're not a writer, you're a waiter.

The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.

The obvious reductio ad absurdum is Holocaust deniers: Should their perspective be provided, for "balance," any time someone writes about the Holocaust?

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.

Characterization is an accident that flows out of action and dialogue.

I'd rather be caught holding up a bank than stealing so much as a two-word phrase from another writer.

Creating characters is like throwing together ingredients for a recipe. I take characteristics I like and dislike in real people I know, or know of, and use them to embellish and define characters.

A publisher should always be on the receiving end. He should take an interest in almost any subject and remain anonymous, letting the author take center stage.

If you can't write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don't have a clear idea.

You write your life story by the choices you make.

Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.

It wasn't my natural inclination to get into writing protest songs.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

Yes, there is a Nirvanah; it is leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem

He who writes prose builds his temple to Fame in rubble; he who writes verses builds it in granite.

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail

History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history.

Theorists write all the popular books on science: Heinz Pagels, Frank Wilczek, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, et al. And why not? They have all that spare time.

When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian leadIf I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it.

Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.