Writing Quotes

Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.

When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.

There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

The one good thing about not seeing you is that I can write you letters.

Let's give the historians something to write about

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

I like to write music for fun. That's my hustle, my grind, my means of stayin' alive, and it's also my recreation, too.

I think everything I do has Howard Roark [hero of The Fountainhead] in it, you know, as much as anything. The person I write for is Howard Roark.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

Just as with running, there were days that I didnt feel like writing; I wrote anyways.

You shouldn't change what you are in the search for success.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

It's a damn good story. If you have any comments, write them on the back of a check.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

Dialogue is a necessary evil.

There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content.

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.

Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books.

Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what you're afraid to write about.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

I would argue that coffee has been far more important to literature than alcohol.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing.

That's the beauty of song writing. You never know when inspiration will come or how it will hit, you just gotta kinda grasp a hold of it and make sense of it somehow.

The man who offers an insult writes it in sand, but for the man who receives it, it's chiseled in bronze.

Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software.

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.

You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.

The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

Truth is the lie you once told returning to haunt you

It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

In fact, one could argue that the skill of the fiction writer boils down to the ability to exploit intensity.

If you let conditions stop you from working, they'll always stop you.

Beginning to write, you discover what you have to write about.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.