Quotes and Sayings about Writing
"Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Balance, Commitment, Sense, Writing)
"When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Computers, History, Books, Past, Reading, Writing)
"I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: God, Books, Free will, Sense, Surprises, Writers, Writing)
"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Writing)
"The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands."
- Abdallah II
(Related: Future, Pen, World, Writing)
"Idol has pretty much taken me out of my recording and out of my choreography. I have managed to slip in some choreography jobs. And I've been writing songs for other artists."
- Paula Abdul
(Related: Artists, Jobs, Pretty, Songs, Writing)
"Well, I think writing is basically about time and rhythm. Like with jazz. You have your basic melody and then you just riff off of it. And the riffs are about timing."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Time, Jazz, Writing)
"First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Fiction, First, Magic, Writing)
"I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: Dreams, People, Writing)
"Learn as much by writing as by reading."
- Lord Acton
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more."
- John Adams
(Related: People, Hope, Freedom, Now, Talk, Thinking, Will, Writing, Years)
"Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that."
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Poetry, Writing, Years)
"Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess."
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Poetry, Books, Living, Pretty, Writing)
"He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they?"
- Robert Adamson
(Related: Encouraging, Poets, State, Visit, Writing)
"Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Writing)
"For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."
- Theodor Adorno
(Related: Man, Writing)
"I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums."
- Christina Aguilera
(Related: Art, History, Love, Movies, Friends, Museums, Reading, Relaxation, Writing)
"I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing."
- Lloyd Alexander
(Related: Adventure, Writing)
"After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published."
- Lloyd Alexander
(Related: Family, Jobs, Support, Writing, Years)
"When I graduated college I needed to make money while I was pursuing acting, so I read screenplays and made a living writing coverage on them for studios."
- Sasha Alexander
(Related: Money, Acting, College, Living, Writing)
"If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time."
- Sherman Alexie
(Related: Time, Poems, Writing)
"All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom."
- Isabel Allende
(Related: Death, End, Freedom, Interest, Justice, Loyalty, Violence, Writing)
"Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day."
- William Allingham
(Related: Day, Learning, Nothing, Writing)
"At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration."
- Chris Van Allsburg
(Related: First, Mind, Questions, Writing)
"When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush were scratching around in caves."
- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
(Related: Law, Literature, Mathematics, Writing)
"Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade."
- Al Alvarez
(Related: Now, Trade, Writing)
"I hate writing."
- Al Alvarez
(Related: Hate, Writing)
"Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money."
- Stephen Ambrose
(Related: Money, Work, Living, Writing)
"It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well."
- Henri Frederic Amiel
(Related: Teaching, Water, Writing)
"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
- Kingsley Amis
(Related: Writing)
"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics."
- David Amram
(Related: Politics, Knowledge, Authority, Literature, World, Writing)
"My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Income, Writing)
"If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Time, Death, Successful, Books, Self, Silly, Writing)
"I'm talking to you and it's basically a direct communication, whereas if I'm writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Communication, Talking, Writing)
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
- Laurie Anderson
(Related: Architecture, Music, Dancing, Writing)
"Like most kids growing up, I had a very wide interest. I was interested in everything. I tried to take advantage of everything, from the sciences to music to writing to literature."
- Michael P. Anderson
(Related: Music, Growing up, Interest, Kids, Literature, Writing)
"I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science."
- Poul Anderson
(Related: Science, First, Harvest, Obvious, Stars, Writing)
"And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative. They were fiscally conservative and socially conservative."
- Sharron Angle
(Related: Conservative, Constitution, Country, Fathers, Founding)
"Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Talent, People, Songs, Writing, Years)
"I spend a lot of time writing in New York."
- Keren Ann
(Related: Time, Writing)
"To do the writing, I have to have time to do research."
- Jean-Jacques Annaud
(Related: Time, Research, Writing)
"When I started writing this, I found that I simply couldn't take fantasy seriously, so it became humorous, and continued from there."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Fantasy, Writing)
"Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Work, Anticipation, Writing)
"Keep writing, because not only does practice improve skill, it gives you more chances to score on the market. I did that for eight years before making my first sale."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: First, Practice, Skill, Writing, Years)
"Have a working spouse, because you won't earn a living from writing - not at first, if ever. My wife worked for years to support us."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Wife, First, Living, Support, Writing, Years)
"I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Writing)
"I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand."
- David Antin
(Related: Poems, Thinking, Writing)
"The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it also has become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it. Besides, in Israel, everyone carries a biography deep inside him."
- Aharon Appelfeld
(Related: People, Biography, Deep, End, Israel, Metaphor, Writing)
"I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it."
- Sergio Aragones
(Related: First, Horror, Jobs, Mystery, Writing)
"No, I have to really focus, especially when I'm writing because I wanna be good at it."
- Tom Araya
(Related: Focus, Writing)
"I'm not taking any interest in politics. I'm not involved in politics in any way. My life is in writing now."
- Jeffrey Archer
(Related: Life, Politics, Interest, Now, Writing)
"I've been doing nineteen hours a day on London, nothing else, I mean this has been my whole life, and writing has been put on one side, and if I'm privileged enough to be the Mayor of this city, then I will not write again."
- Jeffrey Archer
(Related: Life, Day, London, Nothing, Will, Writing)
"I'm passionate again about writing. This is important to me; it's got to be the comeback book."
- Jeffrey Archer
(Related: Writing)
"Writing music is just something that I was born to do."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Music, Writing)
"When I was younger I was obsessed with writing, so even if I wanted to listen, I didn't have time."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Time, Writing)
"So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: People, Inspiration, Waiting, Writing)
"My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs."
- Joan Armatrading
(Related: Mother, Songs, Writing)
"Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion."
- Malcolm Arnold
(Related: Family, Music, Wife, End, Film, Passion, Writing)
"There will always be some kid who's the new Kurt Cobain writing great lyrics and singing from his soul. The problem is they're not marketing that anymore or putting it out there."
- Rosanna Arquette
(Related: Soul, Marketing, Singing, Will, Writing)
"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
- Sholem Asch
(Related: Writing)
"I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve."
- Jane Asher
(Related: Struggle, Writing)
"It ended up being a very good thing, because they finally started writing for the character, and I realized that you have to go to work with a purpose. I learned from the experience and then moved on."
- Matthew Ashford
(Related: Experience, Work, Character, Purpose, Being, Writing)
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Thinking, Writing)
"Writing that's not working for a living."
- Robert Asprin
(Related: Living, Writing)
"I think I would have a better time writing films rather than directing."
- Mackenzie Astin
(Related: Time, Writing)
"A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: Reason, Writing)
"It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Art, Money, Culture, Fact, Talking, Writing)
"It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Art, Money, Culture, Fact, Talking, Writing)
"Life sometimes gets in the way of writing."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Life, Writing)
"I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Writing)
"I'm just writing a story that I want to read."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Want, Writing)
"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
- Francis Bacon
(Related: Man, Reading, Writing)
"It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page."
- Joan Baez
(Related: Nothing, Songs, Words, Writing)
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Work, Suspicion, Writer, Writing)
"I called the doctor, during writing the book, the psychiatrist who treated me at that time, Dr. Jackson. And I said, Dr. Jackson, whole pieces are missing. I don't understand what happened to me."
- Jim Bakker
(Related: Time, Writing)
"It's a dismally lonely business, writing."
- Toni Cade Bambara
(Related: Business, Lonely, Writing)
"You have to have something worth saying and then the ability to say it- writing's a double skill, really."
- Iain Banks
(Related: Ability, Saying, Skill, Worth, Writing)
"Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Life, Writing)
"The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Life, Work, Discipline, Attention, Writing)
"But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Age, Art, People, American, Reading, Writing)
"Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Life, Now, Writing)
"One of the most attractive things about writing your autobiography is that you're not dead."
- Joseph Barbera
(Related: Autobiography, Writing)
"I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it."
- Carl Barks
(Related: World, Writing, Years)
"One problem was that my direct testimony was in writing, so a lot of people didn't get to see it. I hope they see it, because I think it built a very strong case."
- Jim Barksdale
(Related: People, Hope, Writing)
"The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes."
- Dave Barry
(Related: Religion, People, Religious, Risk, Writing)
"I want to release another CD this year, finish writing a screenplay, and make another short film."
- Todd Barry
(Related: Film, Want, Writing)
"I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase."
- Todd Barry
(Related: Writing)
"Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem."
- John Barton
(Related: Order, Privacy, Respect, Writing)
"When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans."
- Mario Batali
(Related: Poetry, College, Day, Friends, Hair, Writing)
"While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: People, Writer, Writing)
"Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated."
- Alison Bechdel
(Related: Writing)
"Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now."
- Alison Bechdel
(Related: Life, Now, Writing)
"For some reason writing and drawing are very separate processes for me."
- Alison Bechdel
(Related: Reason, Writing)
"Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way."
- Beck
(Related: Life, Time, Work, Writing, Years)
"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence."
- Samuel Beckett
(Related: Nothing, Silence, Writing)
"I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound."
- Gerry Beckley
(Related: Age, Heart, America, Song, Sound, Will, Writing)
"I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight."
- Venerable Bede
(Related: Discipline, Church, Delight, Singing, Study, Teaching, Writing)
"I am a drinker with writing problems."
- Brendan Behan
(Related: Problems, Writing)
"We expect to keep our writing sessions going until late spring, then to play some new material in a few secret club dates. The record will likely take a long time and may not surface until 1999!"
- Adrian Belew
(Related: Time, May, Play, Spring, Will, Writing)
"When I came out of service, the first couple of releases didn't really hit so I just took a little hiatus and sat down to see what was happening. I just glued my ears to the radio and then I started writing - the first hit record that came out was "Everybody Loves a Winner.""
- William Bell
(Related: First, Service, Writing)
"Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing."
- Hilaire Belloc
(Related: Writing)
"I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it."
- Hilaire Belloc
(Related: Writing)
"I don't keep any copy of my books around... they would embarass me. When I finish writing my books, I kick them in the belly, and have done with them."
- Ludwig Bemelmans
(Related: Books, Writing)
"Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline."
- Peter Benchley
(Related: Love, Time, Discipline, Order, Solitude, Writing)
"Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while."
- Peter Benchley
(Related: Oceans, Sea, Television, Wildlife, Writing)
"It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: Time, Talent, Famous, Writing, Years)
"The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: Necessity, Writing)
"It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Writing)
"To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked."
- Dirk Benedict
(Related: Music, Acting, College, Writing)
"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like."
- Walter Benjamin
(Related: People, Books, Poor, Writers, Writing)
"I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me."
- Tom Berenger
(Related: Acting, Irish, Rebellion, Writing)
"I want to direct films, because I am a painter and a sculptor and I've done a lot of writing."
- Xander Berkeley
(Related: Want, Writing)
"Writing is an antidote for loneliness."
- Steven Berkoff
(Related: Loneliness, Writing)
"I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic."
- Shelley Berman
(Related: Humor, Literary, Teaching, Writing)
"It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen."
- William Bernbach
(Related: Nature, People, Human nature, Key, Skill, Writer)
"My current project is my band, Population 1. We are writing, rehearsing and playing in Los Angeles."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Population, Project, Writing)
"There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: Song, Writing)
"As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people."
- Nuno Bettencourt
(Related: People, Writing, Years)
"I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco."
- Jello Biafra
(Related: Music, Songs, Writing)
"I went through a big Alice Cooper phase, which was probably a major influence on my writing style later, especially after Plastic Surgery Disasters."
- Jello Biafra
(Related: Disasters, Influence, Style, Writing)
"I am much more involved in the filmmaking experience on Mag Seven. I'm much more involved in story elements, casting decisions, the writing of the show, the blocking of the scenes."
- Michael Biehn
(Related: Experience, Decisions, Writing)
"When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11."
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Music, Writing)
"There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes."
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Work, Ideas, Moments, Writing)
"My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!"
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Attitude, Friends, Writing)
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Music, Writing)
"People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me."
- Harrison Birtwistle
(Related: Music, People, English, Writing)
"As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note."
- Georges Bizet
(Related: Adultery, Crime, Evil, Fanaticism, Supernatural, Writing)
"I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There's still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven't been explained in song."
- Clint Black
(Related: Christmas, Old, Song, Songs, Traditions, Writing)
"I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception."
- Jimmy Carl Black
(Related: Music, Mother, Earth, Writing)
"When I started writing it was kind of hard getting people to do my stuff. They' say they couldn't do my style."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: People, Style, Writing)
"When I was young, I just sat down and started playing Chopsticks at the piano. I got so far and then lost interest. Eventually, I regained it and started writing songs."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Interest, Songs, Writing)
"Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best."
- Carla Bley
(Related: Talent, Composers, Living, Writing)
"One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good."
- Steven Bochco
(Related: Problems, Writing)
"For some reason, the concept of writing with swing chords was intimidating."
- Suzy Bogguss
(Related: Reason, Writing)
"I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975."
- Eric Bogosian
(Related: Acting, School, Writing)
"I love songwriting. It's second to my love for singing in how I express myself."
- Michael Bolton
(Related: Love, Singing)
"I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed."
- Lisa Bonet
(Related: Film, Media, Now, Writing)
"We had offers to go everywhere and we could have done them. But what would have been the point? We were tired. We had worked hard and needed a break before we got stale. We spent six months at home and writing songs."
- John Bonham
(Related: Home, Months, Songs, Writing)
"Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days."
- Jo Bonner
(Related: History, People, Country, Disaster, Fact, Writing)
"The central problem of novel-writing is causality."
- Jorge Luis Borges
"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Reading)
"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Dream, Nothing, Writing)
"I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Work, Attention, Trying, Writers, Writing)
"I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Love, Fiction, Writing)
"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Living, Reality, Writer, Writing)
"In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Biography, Fact, Facts, Fiction, Writing)
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: First, Importance, Value, Writer, Writing)
"I've loved doing "E.R." for the quality of the writing and the great people I get to work with."
- Julie Bowen
(Related: Work, Quality, People, Writing)
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Reality, Writing)
"My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Idea, Writing)
"Love is easy, and I love writing. You can't resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you're in love."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Love, Idea, Writing)
"You fail only if you stop writing."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Writing)
"I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of."
- Barbara Taylor Bradford
(Related: Work, Time, Day, Thinking, Writing)
"I didn't necessarily have a total idea when I was writing the movie of where everything was going. I just wanted to have really realistic dialogue and write like people I knew talked. I tried to keep it very real."
- Zach Braff
(Related: People, Idea, Writing)
"There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Honesty, Personality, Reason, Relationships, Writing)
"There is no great writing, only great rewriting."
- Justice Brandeis
(Related: Writing)
"Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers."
- Jimmy Breslin
(Related: Quality, Newspapers, Writing)
"I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines."
- Jimmy Breslin
(Related: Life, Beer, Job, Newspapers, Rest, Writing)
"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."
- Andre Breton
(Related: Nature, Writing)
"But when it came to jamming and writing songs like we used to, we realized Brandon was a huge spirit in the band. Who knew? It was just something we had to learn."
- Edie Brickell
(Related: Songs, Spirit, Writing)
"I'm writing a new book right now that is like an erotica manifesto."
- Susie Bright
(Related: Now, Right, Writing)
"My education and background thoroughly inform my writing."
- David Brin
(Related: Education, Writing)
"I like to be surprised. Fresh implications and plot twists erupt as a story unfolds. Characters develop backgrounds, adding depth and feeling. Writing feels like exploring."
- David Brin
(Related: Feeling, Writing)
"I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Day, Job, Project, Writing)
"In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Time, Life, Winning, Contention, Writing)
"It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Time, Contention, Writing)
"You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Will, Writing)
"Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Attention, Innocence, State, Writing)
"While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then."
- Garth Brooks
(Related: Music, Time, Baseball, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge."
- Gwendolyn Brooks
(Related: Challenge, Writing)
"Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Connection, Fantasy, Writing)
"My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls."
- James Broughton
(Related: Flags, Writing)
"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made."
- James Broughton
(Related: Poems, Writing)
"I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion."
- James Broughton
(Related: Emotion, Order, Writing)
"I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that."
- David R. Brower
(Related: Work, Conservation, Earth, Friends, Writing)
"I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Day, Garden, Projects, Words, Writing)
"Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Work, Living, Satisfaction, Writing)
"I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Duty, Emotions, Writer, Writing)
"Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can."
- Helen Gurley Brown
(Related: Beauty, Reading, Thinking, Writing)
"Yeah, man I am going to be writing a book soon. The reality of being in a rock band in the music business'."
- Steve Brown
(Related: Music, Business, Being, Man, Reality, Writing)
"I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment."
- Tina Brown
(Related: Politics, May, Mind, Writing)
"I actually write film music because I'm classically trained on the piano so as well as songwriting I also write actual film music that could be used for movies like war movies and love movies."
- Vanessa Brown
(Related: Love, Movies, Music, War, Film)
"I've written many extra verses to songs that I learned to sing - an extra verse about a friend, or just add some verse - and that led to writing my own songs."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Friend, Songs, Writing)
"That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Business, Music, Time, Folk, Learning, Play, Song, Writing)
"I'd have to say that my favorite thing is writing a song that really says how I feel, what I believe - and it even explains the world to myself better than I knew it."
- Jackson Browne
(Related: Favorite, Song, World, Writing)
"Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century."
- Gavin Bryars
(Related: Music, Now, Writing)
"As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien."
- Gavin Bryars
(Related: Art, Music, Time, Idea, Performance, Artists, Painting, Theatre, Writing)
"I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer."
- Gavin Bryars
(Related: Name, Writing)
"I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder."
- Gavin Bryars
(Related: Being, Writing)
"I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting."
- Bill Bryson
(Related: Science, Trying, Writing)
"The writing is all done, so it's all about verbalizing everything from point A to point B, and certainly there's a bit of politics involved, so it's a different thing."
- Lindsey Buckingham
(Related: Politics, Writing)
"I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me."
- Vincent Bugliosi
(Related: Jury, Writer, Writing)
"Shake was a dramatist of note; He lived by writing things to quote."
- H. C. Bunner
(Related: Writing)
"Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote."
- H. C. Bunner
(Related: Shakespeare, Writing)
"All the nice things about Suzanne are me. All the things that aren't nice, that was just the writing."
- Delta Burke
(Related: Writing)
"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."
- Frances Hodgson Burnett
(Related: Garden, Writing)
"If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all."
- Leo Burnett
(Related: Business, Customer, Writing)
"I don't want boys to use their pencils for improper writing."
- John Burns
(Related: Boys, Want, Writing)
"It's really hard to say how long the show will last and will continue. I hope it lasts for a very long time. As long as kids watch it, anyway. But beyond this, sure, I would love to be doing film. I'd love to be doing more theater and perhaps even writing."
- Steve Burns
(Related: Love, Time, Hope, Film, Kids, Theater, Will, Writing)
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Life, Work, Being, Future, Literature, Study, Writer, Writing)
"And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Writing)
"In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed."
- William S. Burroughs
(Related: Acting, Space, Writing)
"I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue."
- Steve Buscemi
(Related: Writing)
"I think probably the only thing that is around in these songs is that I was really lonely when I wrote a lot of them. But it was really by my own choosing because I was devoting myself to songwriting and dancing and I wasn't really going out and seeing people."
- Kate Bush
(Related: People, Dancing, Lonely, Songs)
"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Persistence, Thinking, Writing)
"Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Public, Writing)
"No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fiction, Interest, Writing)
"Most of us don't have to worry about being shot of we poke our noses outside. So we are comfortable, but the people I'm writing about are definitely not comfortable, and being shot while they're still inside is a good possibility."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: People, Possibility, Being, Noses, Worry, Writing)
"I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Experience, Time, Family, Being, Feeling, Research, Writing)
"And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Day, Excuses, First, Writers, Writing)
"Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Fantasy, First, Open, Rules, Writing)
"I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Science, Time, Fiction, Reading, Writing)
"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Doubt, Man, Will, Writing, Years)
"I am so happy to be on a show with writing I wanted to participate in."
- Yancy Butler
(Related: Writing)
"I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff."
- David Byrne
(Related: Writing)
"Now my drug is writing or acting, being creative."
- Scott Caan
(Related: Acting, Being, Now, Writing)
"But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper."
- Scott Caan
(Related: Writing)
"Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either."
- Meg Cabot
(Related: People, Advice, Will, Writing)
"You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel."
- Tim Cahill
(Related: Travel, Writer, Writing)
"Publishing your work is important. Even if you are giving a piece to some smaller publication for free, you will learn something about your writing. The editor will say something, friends will mention it. You will learn."
- Tim Cahill
(Related: Work, Friends, Giving, Publishing, Will, Writing)
"Anyone can write. But comedy, you've got to do some writing. You get one comedy script to every 20 dramas."
- Michael Caine
(Related: Comedy, Writing)
"I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels."
- John Cale
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"That's what my life is, writing songs."
- John Cale
(Related: Life, Songs, Writing)
"In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies."
- L. Sprague de Camp
(Related: Detail, Writing)
"I thought, well I can do that. I couldn't be bothered writing a book review, because I'd have to read the book, I haven't got time to read a whole book for a fifty dollar write-up."
- Eddie Campbell
(Related: Time, Thought, Writing)
"The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation."
- Elias Canetti
(Related: Infinite, Night, Writing)
"I was half asleep lying there writing this lyric in my head at about 3:30 in the morning. I woke Steve up with this idea and then we went into the living room where there was a little upright piano and finished the song. I wonder where that piano is now?"
- Jim Capaldi
(Related: Idea, Living, Lying, Now, Song, Wonder, Writing)
"After that, I specifically started writing lyrics. I would like sweat and think and get it all together."
- Jim Capaldi
(Related: Writing)
"For me, naming bands was the forerunner to really writing lyrics, because I work off titles."
- Jim Capaldi
(Related: Work, Titles, Writing)
"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Art, Being, Difference, Fun, Writing)
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Music, Laws, Light, Painting, Perspective, Rules, Writing)
"I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Talk, Worth, Writing)
"That isn't writing at all, it's typing."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Writing)
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."
- Truman Capote
(Related: Music, Pleasure, Words, Writing)
"Scriptwriting is the toughest part of the whole racket... the least understood and the least noticed."
- Frank Capra
"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Writing)
"There is more good writing and good acting in any ten minutes of Twister than in, say, all of Citizen Kane."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Acting, Writing)
"I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Money, Being, Career, Writing)
"But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Change, Life, Work, Love, Fun, Now, Teaching, Writing)
"I listen to music constantly while writing."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Music, Writing)
"Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Skin, Writing)
"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."
- Thomas Carlyle
(Related: Idleness, Labor, Writing)
"Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie."
- John le Carre
(Related: Deserted, Walking, Writing)
"I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now."
- Jonathan Carroll
(Related: Work, Memories, Now, Will, Writing)
"If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege."
- Jonathan Carroll
(Related: Obligation, Privilege, Today, Writing)
"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
- Angela Carter
(Related: Experience, History, Reading, World)
"My relationship with Music Row has always been, from my end, optimistic and hopeful that there is more than one way to approach the writing, recording, and marketing of an album."
- Deana Carter
(Related: Music, End, Marketing, Writing)
"Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does."
- Nancy Cartwright
(Related: Writing)
"It's like a novelist writing far out things. If it makes a point and makes sense, then people like to read that. But if it's off in left field and goes over the edge, you lose it. The same with musical talent, I think."
- Johnny Cash
(Related: Talent, People, Sense, Writing)
"But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Nothing, Right, Writing)
"My idea of what's good and bad and right and wrong is maybe greyer than most, and I like writing about that."
- Shaun Cassidy
(Related: Idea, Right, Writing, Wrong)
"I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing."
- Dan Castellaneta
(Related: Acting, College, School, Writing)
"There are no rules to writing a song."
- Randy Castillo
(Related: Rules, Song, Writing)
"I'm not sure why writing for others became harder. Probably a reluctance to give away anything you might conceivably use yourself caused a block. I did it, but it remained hard when it had once been easy."
- Dick Cavett
(Related: Writing)
"That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution."
- Michael Chabon
(Related: Solution, Writing, Zone)
"Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in."
- Michael Chabon
(Related: Work, Favors, Mind, Writing)
"I would be sad if it ended now. It's been the best job I've had by a long shot, especially creatively because the writing is so good. Every week I get the script and I laugh out loud and get excited for the different stuff we get to do."
- Sarah Chalke
(Related: Job, Now, Writing)
"Just after writing those we were called up to defend a new position on the left, where the terrible storming of the bridge over the Antietam took place."
- Joshua Chamberlain
(Related: Writing)
"I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing."
- Joshua Chamberlain
(Related: Circumstances, Writing)
"The lyrics came out of necessity. When we started writing the record, we started in a more fusion environment and that got boring really quick and that wasn't what we were about on an organic level."
- Jimmy Chamberlin
(Related: Environment, Necessity, Quick, Writing)
"Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Perception, Necessity, Writing)
"Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest. It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Power, Ideas, Emotions, Sensations, Thinking, Writing)
"The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Challenge, Effect, Leisure)
"The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Thoughts, Man, Sense, Writing)
"After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book."
- Iris Chang
(Related: First, Style, Writing)
"While I was writing Wild Swans I thought the famine was the result of economic mismanagement but during the research I realised that it was something more sinister."
- Jung Chang
(Related: Thought, Famine, Research, Result, Swans, Writing)
"Songwriting is a very mysterious process. It feels like creating something from nothing. It's something I don't feel like I really control."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: Control, Nothing)
"I end up writing about all kinds of things. I never make an attempt to write about anything in particular. I don't have a little list of topics to write about."
- Tracy Chapman
(Related: End, Writing)
"There are very few solid family films. A lot of the writing is awful."
- Chevy Chase
(Related: Family, Writing)
"Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work."
- Paddy Chayefsky
(Related: Work, Art, Artists, Talk, Thinking, Writers, Writing)
"Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego."
- John Cheever
(Related: Ego, Promises, Writers, Writing)
"This doctrine of Christ and of the apostles, from which the true faith of the primitive church was received, the apostles at first delivered orally, without writing, but later, not by any human counsel but by the will of God, they handed it on in the Scriptures."
- Martin Chemnitz
(Related: Faith, God, Church, Christ, Doctrine, First, Will, Writing)
"Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics."
- Ron Chernow
(Related: Writing)
"In my writing with Extreme, there are heavy themes. The cover photo has me with a gun to my neck. I am not advocating suicide. I am taking the philosophy that man is the measure of his own fate."
- Gary Cherone
(Related: Extreme, Fate, Man, Measure, Philosophy, Suicide, Writing)
"For TV I don't think I could have gotten a better part than Uncle Junior because of the intimacy of the character based on David Chase's brilliant writing."
- Dominic Chianese
(Related: Character, Intimacy, Writing)
"If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction."
- Alex Chilton
(Related: Conviction, Expression, Song, Spirit, Writing)
"I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties."
- Agatha Christie
(Related: People, Worry, Writing)
"I certainly was an actor and then I drifted more towards writing and directing."
- Thomas Haden Church
(Related: Actor, Writing)
"I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting."
- Winston Churchill
(Related: Politics, War, Painting, Politicians, Writing)
"I sort of was good at writing essays. I was never very good at mathematics, and I was never very good at algebra. I loved science, but I wasn't sure of it."
- Diane Cilento
(Related: Science, Mathematics, Writing)
"And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out."
- Sandra Cisneros
(Related: Life, Time, Character, Writing, Years)
"The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song."
- Gene Clark
(Related: Song, Writing)
"There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is."
- Guy Clark
(Related: Rules, Songs, Writing)
"I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can."
- Guy Clark
(Related: Home, Day, Play, Reason, Songs, Writing)
"To be awarded a prize which takes its name from an illustrious Dutchman who at the same time was a great citizen of Europe and through his writings did so much to open up our modern world of sensibility and thought is indeed a most signal honour."
- John G. D. Clark
(Related: Time, Thought, Europe, Name, Open, Sensibility, World)
"The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet."
- Mary Higgins Clark
(Related: Feet, First, Months, Writing)
"I don't think Capote loved Smith. But he did make a deep connection. It upset some people, because that had never been the approach to journalistic crime writing, to look into the mind of the killer."
- Gerald Clarke
(Related: People, Connection, Crime, Deep, Mind, Writing)
"In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels."
- Gerald Clarke
(Related: Causes, Caution, Production, Writing)
"I started writing songs at age 15."
- Vince Clarke
(Related: Age, Songs, Writing)
"I wasn't very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children's birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos."
- Jill Clayburgh
(Related: Birthday, Family, Son, Career, Children, Party, Thinking, Writing)
"Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus."
- John Clayton
(Related: Writing)
"I enjoy writing for third and fourth graders most of all."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Writing)
"In writing I found something I could do at least as well as my peers, if not better."
- Brian P. Cleary
(Related: Writing)
"The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books."
- Eldridge Cleaver
(Related: Religion, Politics, Soul, Heart, Books, Court, Law, Writing)
"When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy."
- John Cleese
(Related: Acting, American, Comedy, Kids, Principles, Problems, Teenage, Writing)
"I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat."
- John Cleese
(Related: Actor, Writer, Writing)
"As an actor, I go where the good writing is. That's the bottom line."
- Glenn Close
(Related: Actor, Writing)
"Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it."
- Adam Clymer
(Related: Right, Writing)
"I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing."
- Adam Clymer
(Related: Thought, Writing)
"The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Learning, Writing)
"I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Music, Poetry, Time, Thought, Writing)
"I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Body, First, Songs, Writing, Years)
"I wanted to play rock and roll when I started playing. Nobody at that time ever thought about songwriting. You sang songs, that's all. You sang other people's songs. That's all there were."
- Bruce Cockburn
(Related: Time, Thought, People, Play, Songs)
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
- Jean Cocteau
(Related: Poets)
"You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Writing)
"Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Writing)
"I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Ideas, Writing)
"I became quite taken over by Johnson's personality at some points while writing the biography, and since I went straight on to The Closed Circle afterwards, I did sometimes feel I could hear him whispering in my ear while I was working on it."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Biography, Personality, Writing)
"As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?"
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Politics, Writing)
"As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Money, Wife, Journalism, Writing)
"When you do a writing job for a studio, one of the things you want to do is satisfy the expectations of your employer. That's a little bit different than when you sit down and write something to satisfy yourself, because then you're the employer."
- Joel Coen
(Related: Expectations, Job, Want, Writing)
"I see no marks of Wordsworths style of writing or style of thinking in my own work, yet Wordsworth is a constant presence when I write about human beings and their relations to the natural world."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Work, Style, Thinking, World, Writing)
"If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Feelings, Heart, Thoughts, Animals, Consciousness, May, Mind, Project, Temptation, Writing)
"Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say?"
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Lady, Language, Limits, Writing)
"I can come off as pretty arrogant, but it's because I know I'm right. I'm very, very good at writing protocols. I've accomplished more working on my own than I ever did as part of a team."
- Bram Cohen
(Related: Pretty, Right, Writing)
"I want to be as honest as I can about the things I've been through - the sorrows and joys, victories and defeats - and to use those experiences as a well to draw from. Hopefully, the songs that result from that kind of writing will be songs that mean something to others."
- Jim Cole
(Related: Result, Songs, Want, Will, Writing)
"I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores."
- Ornette Coleman
(Related: People, Writing)
"After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player."
- Ornette Coleman
(Related: Time, Being, End, Play, Writing)
"I remember once, we got an interview, and he said, 'Dad, these people are writing about me like I'm an adult. Don't they know I'm a kid?' I have never tried to encourage him to get a music image like other musicians have."
- Ornette Coleman
(Related: Music, People, Musicians, Writing)
"Writing only leads to more writing."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Writing)
"I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers."
- Jackie Collins
(Related: People, Baby, Books, Want, Writing)
"I don't believe in writing anything that I don't know about or haven't researched about personally. I like to transport the reader to places, and in order to do that I have to do the research."
- Jackie Collins
(Related: Order, Research, Writing)
"Do not copy my style! The first rule of writing is write about what you know, not what you think you know. So, think about what you've done in your life and write about that."
- Jackie Collins
(Related: Life, First, Writing)
"The first is that instead of writing a sequel, which is what most people do, this is in fact a prequel. Although we didn't know that when we began the process."
- James Collins
(Related: People, Fact, First, Writing)
"I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that."
- Joan Collins
(Related: Sister, Class, English, First, School, Writing)
"I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot... and memory is important."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Career, Memory, Wishes, Writing)
"If I give myself a chore, for instance, when I was writing the songs for Shameless, I said to myself, Now, every day for 90 days you have to write a song; good, bad or indifferent. So that was really helpful."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Day, Now, Song, Songs, Writing)
"Writing anything is terribly hard but, alas for me, because I am addicted, a heck of a lot of fun. I often am sorry I ever started writing prose, because it is so hard. But I can't stop."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Fun, Prose, Writing)
"I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart."
- Judy Collins
(Related: Poetry, Feelings, Heart, Deep, Songs, Writing)
"I'm writing new songs for a Broadway version of Tarzan, which is very interesting. I think what I learned from the Brother Bear score side of things, I've brought into the new Tarzan songs. Thinking outside just guitar, bass, drums and keyboards."
- Phil Collins
(Related: Brother, Guitar, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"I'd be happy to do Star Trek again, if the writing was right."
- Stephen Collins
(Related: Right, Writing)
"Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again."
- Stephen Collins
(Related: Job, Writing)
"If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn't know how to live. It's your best friend."
- Jessi Colter
(Related: Friend, Being, Writing)
"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Admiration, Difficulty, Will, Writing)
"I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people."
- Shawn Colvin
(Related: People, Sensibility, Songs, Writing)
"Writing has never been a driving force within me."
- Jeffrey Combs
(Related: Driving, Force, Writing)
"I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love."
- Michael Connelly
(Related: Love, First, World, Writing)
"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Art, Journalism, Literature, Will, Writing)
"Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Will, Writing)
"Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about."
- Jack K. Cooke
(Related: Worth, Writing)
"There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Reading, Rules, Talking, Thinking, Writing)
"I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession."
- Caroline B. Cooney
(Related: Love, Profession, Writing)
"If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story."
- Caroline B. Cooney
(Related: Life, Writing)
"Very curious, at the age of about 13 years, Oswald began to study Marxism and he kept on in his writing, affirming that he was a Marxist. Probably he did want to show himself as a great, supreme Marxist."
- John Sherman Cooper
(Related: Age, Marxism, Study, Want, Writing, Years)
"I touched an Oscar once. Friend of mine has one, for writing. As soon as I touched it, he said, Now you'll never win one."
- Rob Corddry
(Related: Friend, Now, Writing)
"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile."
- Robert Cormier
(Related: Time, First, Right, Word, Writing)
"Writing is a solitary occupation."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Occupation, Writing)
"One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Time, Being, Mind, Research, Writing)
"Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Attention, Thinking, Writing)
"And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Books, Committee, Decisions, Simplicity, Writing)
"At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Beginning, Career, Risk, Writers, Writing)
"If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it."
- Doug Coupland
(Related: Money, Hope, End, Now, Want, Writing)
"Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Time, Conservative, English, Language, Shakespeare, Writer)
"I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern."
- Peter Coyote
(Related: Actor, Being, College, State, Writing)
"We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the "writing style" of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed."
- David Crane
(Related: Environment)
"The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren't sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters."
- David Crane
(Related: Time, Being, Games, Hearing, Letters, Writers, Writing)
"And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before."
- Hart Crane
(Related: Poetry, Fancy, Now, Office, Present, Symbol, Writing)
"Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!"
- Robert Creeley
(Related: Imagination, People, May, Reading, Writing)
"I've heard rumors that the Petersons are writing a book. It will be very interesting to see what they have to say, but I don't know anything about the Rochas."
- Catherine Crier
(Related: Rumors, Will, Writing)
"Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult."
- David Cronenberg
(Related: Writing)
"But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be."
- David Cronenberg
(Related: Movies, Innocence, Writing)
"I don't mind writing so I didn't find that difficult, it's just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it's pretty neat."
- David Cronenberg
(Related: Time, Connection, Fans, Mind, Pretty, Question, Writing)
"I think MTV put a huge dent in the songwriting craft."
- Christopher Cross
"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."
- Samuel McChord Crothers
(Related: Prose, Writer, Writing)
"Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written."
- Stanley Crouch
(Related: Day, Now, Thinking, Want, Writing)
"The writing process for me is pretty much always the same - it's a solitary experience."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Experience, Pretty, Writing)
"When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Guitar)
"I have been around for a long, long time. I didn't make it 'til I was older. I went through the period when women were not getting signed, particularly if you were writing songs that were lyrically propelled."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Women, Time, Songs, Writing)
"Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist."
- Cameron Crowe
(Related: Age, Love, Movies, Music, Being, First, Learning, Writers, Writing)
"Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years."
- George Crumb
(Related: Writing, Years)
"Plus, we spend most of our time writing music. Most of the time is spent in the studio in my house."
- Warren Cuccurullo
(Related: Time, Music, Writing)
"Yeah, I came in at the end of the Notorious album, played on about five tracks and then we went on a tour. Then we did another album, Big Thing, and then we started writing songs together in 1989."
- Warren Cuccurullo
(Related: End, Songs, Writing)
"So, once I get writing I really try and put five to eight hours a day in my room with a guitar to really try and come up with stuff that feels interesting enough to me to keep it."
- Catie Curtis
(Related: Day, Guitar, Writing)
"I have tried to explore the little talent I have for writing."
- Cyril Cusack
(Related: Talent, Writing)
"When I first started writing, I was in advertising at the time, I was doing most of my writing on weekends. I had studied most of the other series heroes and I figured it would be fun for mine to be different and put him in and around water. So I dreamed up Dirk Pitt."
- Clive Cussler
(Related: Time, Advertising, First, Fun, Heroes, Water, Writing)
"It's amazing to me that people have any interest in such a low-level sex scandal. If I were sleeping with a congressman, maybe, but I'm a nobody and the people I'm writing about are nobodies."
- Jessica Cutler
(Related: Sex, People, Interest, Scandal, Writing)
"I have four shelves covered with journals that I've written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I've probably written 100 songs."
- Miley Cyrus
(Related: Dad, Songs, Writing)
"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: People, Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors."
- Edward Dahlberg
(Related: Conscience, Writing)
"You shouldn't even be writing this story if you haven't heard me play live. You can't write with the passion you receive until you see a Dick Dale concert."
- Dick Dale
(Related: Passion, Play, Writing)
"I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa."
- John Dalton
(Related: Discipline, Day, Fiction, University, Want, Writing, Years)
"And I love writing. I've always loved writing."
- James Daly
(Related: Love, Writing)
"The funny thing is, the music that I'm writing now is probably some of the most cutting edge we've ever done. The music that I'm thinking about putting on our next album."
- Charlie Daniels
(Related: Funny, Music, Now, Thinking, Writing)
"So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen."
- Glenn Danzig
(Related: Song, Writing)
"It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Work, Fun, Hard work, Writing)
"It did not prepare me for writing or "Power of Attorney." However, what it did is that it forced me out of the DA's office. I stopped getting that county check."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Office, Writing)
"I think that as I continue to write, my writing I hope will become more controversial and more provocative."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Hope, Provocative, Will, Writing)
"I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Anger, Months, Writing)
"I began writing in the 4th grade. As a matter of fact, I produced a play for the entire school. It was about Leif Ericson and the discovery of America."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: America, Discovery, Fact, Play, School, Writing)
"Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult."
- Elizabeth David
(Related: Writing)
"And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me."
- Larry David
(Related: Writing)
"Writing old school HTML code was never very much fun but now it's getting downright tedious for most people."
- Mike Davidson
(Related: People, Fun, Now, Old, School, Writing)
"Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore."
- Robyn Davidson
(Related: Journey, World, Writing)
"If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece."
- Peter Maxwell Davies
(Related: Music, Society, Balance, Boston, End, Writing)
"I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids."
- Peter Maxwell Davies
(Related: Time, Kids, Schools, Teaching, Writing)
"I think that songwriting changed when groups started spending more time in the studio."
- Ray Davies
(Related: Time)
"I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music."
- Anthony Davis
(Related: Love, Music, Opera, Voice, Writing)
"There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music."
- Jim Davis
(Related: Music, Art, Life, Opportunity, Focus, Loss, Writing)
"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way."
- Richard Harding Davis
(Related: Old, Writing)
"The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product."
- Peter Davison
(Related: Writing)
"There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing."
- Clarence Day
(Related: Art, Reading, Thinking, Writing)
"If we were truly in the studio making a record, it would have been more time consuming, and certainly I would have been more involved in the writing process."
- Taylor Dayne
(Related: Time, Writing)
"The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Fun, Law, Writing)
"The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Work, Study, Writers, Writing)
"I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Challenge, Meaning, Writing)
"But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Poetry, Girls, Living, Writing)
"If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Language, Want, Writing)
"I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Poetry, Challenge, Words, Writing)
"I designed all the characters, anyway, and Frank Doyle was doing all the writing. I didn't have any more input on what direction they were going to go with Josie."
- Dan DeCarlo
(Related: Direction, Writing)
"I'm like a junkie for writing."
- Gavin DeGraw
(Related: Writing)
"I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song."
- Gavin DeGraw
(Related: Popular, Song, Writer, Writing)
"For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Thinking, Writing)
"Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me."
- Iris DeMent
(Related: Fun, Writing)
"Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing."
- Iris DeMent
(Related: Time, People, Emotions, Writing)
"I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind."
- Patrick Dennis
(Related: Mind, Writing)
"In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Dream, Language, Literature, Philosophy, Writing)
"My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda."
- Rick Derringer
(Related: Family, Wife, Writer, Writing)
"Someone who wants to write should make an effort to write a little something every day. Writing in this sense is the same as athletes who practice a sport every day to keep their skills honed."
- Anita Desai
(Related: Athletes, Day, Effort, Practice, Sense, Writing)
"My style of writing is to allow the story to unfold on its own. I try not to structure my work too rigidly."
- Anita Desai
(Related: Work, Style, Writing)
"For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working."
- Zooey Deschanel
(Related: Writing)
"Well, as an artist, I think that Elvis's generosity to me he always talked very highly about me, he always spoke very highly about my work and singing and my writing."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Work, Artist, Generosity, Singing, Writing)
"There was a lot of great writing couples, but I try to do it all myself. And it was practically impossible, but I still managed to be ahead of my time."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Time, Writing)
"There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Song, Songs, Writers)
"Writing is like jazz. It can be learned, but it can't be taught."
- Paul Desmond
(Related: Jazz, Writing)
"David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor's instincts, since after all, it's the actors playing the character."
- William Devane
(Related: Trust, Character, Actor, Actors, Writing)
"I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines."
- William Devane
(Related: Architecture, People, Writing)
"Shakespeare in Love... such smart writing of an alternative view of history, and such beautiful acting. Like most Americans, I'm a sucker for the accent."
- Anita Diament
(Related: History, Love, Acting, Americans, Shakespeare, Writing)
"Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day."
- Anita Diament
(Related: Idea, Hope, Day, Light, Now, Play, Right, Song, Will, Writing)
"I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community."
- Anita Diament
(Related: Community, Writing)
"We don't know what we're writing until it just comes out. We don't sit around crunching numbers."
- Dustin Diamond
(Related: Numbers, Writing)
"Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history."
- Jared Diamond
(Related: History, Explanations, Past, Reason)
"Performing is the easiest part of what I do, and songwriting is the hardest."
- Neil Diamond
"Songwriting is different from music, although I don't deny now that it would be nice to have a little more background in music theory."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Music, Now, Theory)
"There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from."
- Neil Diamond
(Related: Mystery, Writing)
"Unfortunately, writing and reporting the truth is not allowed under Castro's tyrannical dictatorship."
- Lincoln Diaz-Balart
(Related: Truth, Dictatorship, Writing)
"Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer."
- Kate DiCamillo
(Related: Interest, Writer, Writing)
"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay."
- Kate DiCamillo
(Related: Writing)
"I got a book deal without even turning in one shred of a writing sample."
- Janice Dickinson
(Related: Writing)
"Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?"
- Joan Didion
(Related: Thought, Writing)
"I've always loved writing."
- Casper Van Dien
(Related: Writing)
"And I ride horses, swim, do a lot of reading, writing."
- Casper Van Dien
(Related: Horses, Reading, Writing)
"While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales."
- Jonathan Dimbleby
(Related: Truth, Errors, Writing)
"A woman's perfume tells more about her than her handwriting."
- Christian Dior
(Related: Woman)
"It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction."
- Cory Doctorow
(Related: Science, Fiction, Writing)
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Being, Fact, Feeling, Writing)
"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: People, Planning, Talking, Writing)
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Exploration, Nothing, Writing)
"Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Driving, Night, Writing)
"I guess you could say I've been writing all my life."
- Anthony Doerr
(Related: Life, Writing)
"I feel for Veronica Mars so much when I'm watching at home. It is a wonderful story. The writing is consistently funny, biting, charming, heart-wrenching, etc. I also like the look of it. The cinematography - different from any other show."
- Jason Dohring
(Related: Funny, Home, Heart, Writing)
"I was able to sit at Lincoln's side and see how he thought and how he acted, and how he felt about what was going on around him. I felt the pressures that were on him. You can see what people were writing to him, how they were nudging him."
- David Herbert Donald
(Related: Thought, People, Writing)
"Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."
- J. P. Donleavy
(Related: Money, Moments, Writing)
"I've always wanted to do a Crichton book. I really love his writing."
- Richard Donner
(Related: Love, Writing)
"I don't think an actor's job is to be recognized. I think an actor's job is to facilitate the writing in a way that changes the way people think. No other business does that."
- Jeffrey Donovan
(Related: Business, People, Actor, Job, Writing)
"I hoped that it would be possible to slide slowly from my public life back to the life of teaching and writing that I had always wanted. But things didn't work out that way."
- Charles Van Doren
(Related: Life, Work, Public, Teaching, Writing)
"I want to be an animated character. I'm also doing more writing and directing."
- Illeana Douglas
(Related: Character, Want, Writing)
"What writing does is to reveal."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Writing)
"It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Life, College, Writing)
"I like writing better. Because I don't have to wear makeup, I don't have to be thin, and I don't have to remember lines."
- Fran Drescher
(Related: Makeup, Writing)
"I'm very involved in the writing on every level."
- Fran Drescher
(Related: Writing)
"I feel I have to work hard to nurture whatever talent I have as an actor. I feel like it's not natural to me. So I don't take it for granted... What I think is my natural ability - which is writing - I think I totally take that for granted."
- David Duchovny
(Related: Work, Talent, Ability, Actor, Writing)
"I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Books, Writing)
"Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Feelings, Language, Poets, Trying, Writing)
"The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter."
- Isadora Duncan
(Related: Experience, First, Writer, Writing)
"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence."
- Isadora Duncan
(Related: Art, Work, Effort, Hard work, Research, Struggle, Writing, Years)
"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Poetry, Sound, Weight, Words, Writing)
"The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Language, Writing)
"Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Books, Children, Sense, Writer, Writing)
"I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Influence, Writing)
"However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Difficulties, Writing)
"Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe."
- John Gregory Dunne
(Related: Job, Labor, Writing)
"For me, songwriting is something like breathing: I just do it. But that doesn't mean you're fantastic."
- Adam Duritz
"I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries."
- Charles S. Dutton
(Related: Comedy, Projects, Trying, Writing)
"Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good."
- Dick Van Dyke
(Related: Time, Idea, Writing)
"The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved."
- George Dzundza
(Related: People, Idea, Writers, Writing)
"The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization."
- Lawrence Eagleburger
(Related: Balance, Question, Writing)
"Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited."
- Steve Earle
(Related: English, Song, Writing)
"I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football."
- Gregg Easterbrook
(Related: Football, Nothing, Winter, Writing, Years)
"For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker."
- Gregg Easterbrook
(Related: Controversy, Writer, Writing)
"Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on."
- Buddy Ebsen
(Related: Fiction, Limits, Value, Writing)
"The most fun I ever have is sitting in with Rick writing, and we laugh at our own jokes."
- Adrian Edmondson
(Related: Fun, Jokes, Writing)
"I've supported myself by writing since 1992, and I'm probably very nearly unemployable by now because employers are likely to be put off by the long gap."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Now, Writing)
"I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Change, Interest, Writing)
"When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum."
- Atom Egoyan
(Related: Mind, Writing)
"David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing."
- Chiwetel Ejiofor
(Related: Work, Thought, Film, Writing)
"Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Blood, Public)
"It is normal for me to wake and find myself writing in the dark... or to be out of my tomb, caught in an unearthly world, alive with the images that haunt me."
- Kim Elizabeth
(Related: World, Writing)
"My writing, like everything I do, comes profoundly from my heart. I believe that if you follow your heart you will be successful in one way or another. Old-fashioned as that might sound, the philosophy is true."
- Kim Elizabeth
(Related: Heart, Successful, Old, Philosophy, Sound, Will, Writing)
"Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour."
- Bret Easton Ellis
(Related: Acting, Writing)
"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."
- Ralph Ellison
(Related: Time, Act, Past, Shadow, Writing)
"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication."
- Ralph Ellison
(Related: Communication, Identity, Importance, Sense, Writer, Writing)
"Writing a novel without being asked seems a bit like having a baby when you have nowhere to live."
- Lucy Ellman
(Related: Baby, Being, Writing)
"I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Career, Months, Play, Writer, Writing)
"My mother and I will continue on some level that I haven't determined yet. I think my mother's a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Mother, Character, Career, Giving, Will, World, Writing)
"I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger."
- Buchi Emecheta
(Related: Children, Kitchen, Now, Value, Writing)
"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Beauty, God, Opportunity)
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Related: France, Reading, Sense, Writing)
"The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing."
- Douglas Engelbart
(Related: Revolution, Invention, Printing, Writing)
"But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found."
- Paul Engle
(Related: Writing)
"My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing."
- Brian Eno
(Related: Writing)
"I am writing a book and that takes third place of importance."
- John Entwistle
(Related: Importance, Writing)
"There is no formula to it. Writing every song is a little journey. The first note has to lift you."
- Enya
(Related: First, Formula, Journey, Song, Writing)
"The writing of a melody is an emotional moment; success doesn't make it easy."
- Enya
(Related: Success, Writing)
"Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from."
- Enya
(Related: Change, Music, Life, Writing)
"I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain."
- Enya
(Related: Love, Discipline, Listening, Walking, Writing)
"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech."
- Nora Ephron
(Related: Acceptance, Care, First, Speech, Writing)
"Writing is the beast unto itself."
- Omar Epps
(Related: Writing)
"The desire to write grows with writing."
- Desiderius Erasmus
(Related: Desire, Writing)
"Writing is a lonely job unless you're a drinker, in which case you always have a friend within reach."
- Emilio Estevez
(Related: Friend, Job, Lonely, Writing)
"My father could have been deported because on his immigration application he said that he was a printer, obviously because he didn't want them to be checking his writings."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Father, Want)
"I have only one loyalty - to my writing. I never wanted to be the head of a studio or a producer."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Loyalty, Writing)
"From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Power, Soul, Heart, Now, Writing)
"Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Life, Time, Chance, Talking, Writing)
"I thought people cared about music in a deep way, so I was writing to that spirit in people and in myself. It was me, thinking I knew what was up. Youth, who else can change the world?"
- Kevin Eubanks
(Related: Change, Music, Thought, People, Deep, Spirit, Thinking, World, Writing, Youth)
"At the same time, it's a family story and more of an epic. I needed the third-person. I tried to give a sense that Cal, in writing his story, is perhaps inventing his past as much as recalling it."
- Jeffrey Eugenides
(Related: Family, Time, Past, Sense, Writing)
"So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why."
- John Fahey
(Related: Country, Right, Songs, Writing)
"I'm a crap guitarist and I find it really hard writing on my own."
- Siobhan Fahey
(Related: Writing)
"I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics."
- Oriana Fallaci
(Related: Politics, Sacrifice, Writing, Years)
"I've tried writing. Two days later I'd go visit it and say, Jesus Christ, who wrote this crap?"
- Dennis Farina
(Related: Christ, Visit, Writing)
"The assertion of failure coming from such persons does not mean that Mr. Mill failed to promote the practical success of those objects the advocacy of which forms the chief feature of his political writings."
- Millicent Fawcett
(Related: Success, Failure)
"Writing is hard work; it's also the best job I've ever had."
- Raymond E. Feist
(Related: Work, Hard work, Job, Writing)
"No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite."
- Federico Fellini
(Related: Film, Writing)
"There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true."
- Francois Fenelon
(Related: Happiness, Virtue, Doctrine, Misery, Religious, Road, Vice, World)
"Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death."
- Edna Ferber
(Related: Death, Life, Love, Defeat, Writer, Writing)
"I wanted to play piano, and that slid quickly into writing - it wasn't enough to play other people's notes: I had to write notes too."
- Luc Ferrari
(Related: People, Play, Writing)
"We were given clear concrete tools. The course did a great job demystifying the art of fiction writing and fostering confidence. The instructor brought complex concepts down to earth. I will miss coming here every week."
- Miguel Ferrer
(Related: Art, Confidence, Earth, Fiction, Job, Tools, Will, Writing)
"But when I started writing songs, I stopped painting completely, and the only art things I do are connected to the career, like album sleeves and, to some extent, posters and things like that."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Art, Career, Painting, Songs, Writing)
"The quality of the writing, really. Simple as that. Beautiful words. It's very nice as a singer to do great songs, which have wonderful lyrics and strong feelings underneath the song."
- Bryan Ferry
(Related: Quality, Feelings, Song, Songs, Words, Writing)
"I should add that it is open to debate whether what we call the writing of history these days is truly scientific."
- Lion Feuchtwanger
(Related: History, Debate, Open, Writing)
"I gave up writing blurbs because you make one friend and 200 enemies."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Friend, Enemies, Writing)
"DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Nothing, Writing)
"I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Man, Old, Writer, Writing, Years)
"One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends."
- Rachel Field
(Related: Friends, Old, Writing)
"Dean had just come from seeing his lawyer. That was the first time that I found out that he had consulted a lawyer. He wanted to tell me what he thought was going on, but he was writing it down as if my house was bugged. He acted like everything was bugged."
- Fred F. Fielding
(Related: Time, Thought, First, Writing)
"I do not think men have more talent. There are a great many women in the arts; novelists, painters, sculptors, poets-but the proportion is far lower in the field of song writing."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Men, Women, Talent, Poets, Song, Writing)
"I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers."
- Joseph Fiennes
(Related: Love, Blood, Writers, Writing)
"I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things."
- Ralph Fiennes
(Related: People)
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Related: Water, Writing)
"Do not let any record company disturb your creative flow. You are not writing for the record company. You're writing for the public."
- Grandmaster Flash
(Related: Company, Public, Writing)
"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Art, Writing)
"Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living."
- Gustave Flaubert
(Related: Life, Living, Worth, Writing)
"You're successful if you can get one person to pick it up and put it on the turntable and go, Wow, thanks for writing that!"
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: Successful, Writing)
"My favorite period is World War II, and I'm in the middle of writing my fourth novel set in that era."
- Ken Follett
(Related: War, Favorite, World, World war, Writing)
"When I'm writing a woman character, I don't think, 'What would a woman do?' I just think, 'What would this character do in this situation?'"
- Ken Follett
(Related: Character, Woman, Writing)
"I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult."
- Ken Follett
(Related: Women, Mystery, Talk, Writing)
"My abilities grow with each job, whether it's writing or directing. When I stop learing, I'll stop working."
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Job, Writing)
"I want to die in the saddle. I love writing, producing, acting, directing."
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Love, Acting, Want, Writing)
"If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Study, Want, Writing)
"I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Poetry, Prose, Writing)
"I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Poetry, Trying, Writers, Writing)
"I spent most of this afternoon writing a new introduction for my autobiography."
- June Foray
(Related: Autobiography, Writing)
"I also believe that writing becomes worthwhile and vitalized only through a full and exciting life."
- Esther Forbes
(Related: Life, Writing)
"Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married."
- Richard Ford
(Related: Being, Persistence, Writing)
"They're hit writers. They're gonna write me a hit whether I wanted it or not you know? I could have put out a single a year ago with the Neptunes and maybe been writing now on top but that was not the path that I chose."
- Willa Ford
(Related: Now, Writers, Writing)
"I mean there are tons of reasons. Well first of all. I write my own record. I don't take other people's materials. And I have a job which is being Willa Ford on top of getting back in the studio and writing and recording."
- Willa Ford
(Related: People, Being, First, Job, Writing)
"So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale."
- Richard Foreman
(Related: Writing)
"There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end."
- C. S. Forester
(Related: Beginning, End, Writing)
"Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know."
- C. S. Forester
(Related: Work, Writing)
"Novel writing wrecks homes."
- C. S. Forester
(Related: Writing)
"The creative act is like writing a letter. A letter is a project; you don't sit down to write a letter unless you know what you want to say and to whom you want to say it."
- Lukas Foss
(Related: Act, Project, Want, Writing)
"Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Day, Result, Writing)
"Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Time, Travel, World, Writing, Wrong)
"There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Future, Historians, Writing)
"I've been writing full-time since 1978."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Writing)
"I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new."
- Alan Dean Foster
"I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean."
- Jodie Foster
(Related: Movies, Action, Writing)
"Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead."
- Gene Fowler
(Related: Blood, Writing)
"The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from."
- Gene Fowler
(Related: Successful, Forget, Writer, Writing)
"Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running."
- Gene Fowler
(Related: Running, Writing)
"People would say, Can we develop a sitcom around you? and I would say, Not interested. I'm very happy doing standup and writing and taking my kids to school."
- Jeff Foxworthy
(Related: People, Kids, School, Writing)
"Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."
- Janet Frame
(Related: Imagination, Writing, Years)
"As a member of this court I am not justified in writing my private notions of policy into the Constitution, no matter how deeply I may cherish them or how mischievous I may deem their disregard."
- Felix Frankfurter
(Related: Policy, Constitution, Court, May, Writing)
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Reading, Worth, Writing)
"If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing."
- Benjamin Franklin
(Related: Reading, Worth, Writing)
"The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need."
- Jonathan Franzen
(Related: Pleasure, Writing)
"It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated."
- Jonathan Franzen
(Related: Beginning, Reading, Writing)
"I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Crime, Order, Trying, Writing)
"That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Prison, Writers, Writing)
"I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to work."
- Glenn Frey
(Related: Work, Want, Writing)
"Especially in the last 10 years, the writing on animated shows has jumped by leaps and bounds."
- Will Friedle
(Related: Writing, Years)
"I've been doing my big theater projects, which take years, and writing a song here and there."
- David Friedman
(Related: Projects, Song, Theater, Writing, Years)
"In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure."
- David Friedman
(Related: Music, Success, Value, Writing)
"When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine."
- David Friedman
(Related: People, Decision, Writing)
"Songwriting is the most terrifying thing to me, because you are really laying your heart out there."
- David Friedman
(Related: Heart)
"I have been writing since I was about 20, and at first I wrote in secret and never showed anybody. I was very concerned about making a living, so I conducted."
- David Friedman
(Related: First, Living, Writing)
"One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Music, Film, Logic, Machine, Sound, Writing)
"We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more."
- Fred Frith
(Related: Business, Gravity, Old, Songs, Writing)
"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second."
- Robert Frost
(Related: First, Pressure, Talking, Writing)
"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Tennis, Writing)
"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."
- Robert Frost
(Related: End, Writing)
"Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Acting, Actor, Day, Grave, Writer, Writing, Years)
"I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Home, Smoking, Writing)
"The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work."
- Margaret Fuller
(Related: Work, Criticism, Writing)
"I think one of the things about writing in the studio is that the song hasn't matured, if you like, so quite often the vocals are early attempts. Whereas once you've taken it out on the road a bit, you learn more about a song."
- Peter Gabriel
(Related: Road, Song, Writing)
"I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Writing)
"Because, if one is writing novels today, concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons, for wasted effort."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Beauty, Effort, Prose, Right, Today, Writing)
"I loved writing a book in which, in some ways, it's very, very classical, and in some ways I'm breaking lots of rules about what you can do and what you can't do."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Rules, Writing)
"I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift."
- Mavis Gallant
(Related: Life, Father, Dream, Fear, Vocation, Writing)
"We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study."
- Mohandas Gandhi
(Related: Books, Open, Speech, Study, Writing)
"My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter."
- Jeff Gannon
(Related: Time, Job, Past, Writing)
"That's why, when Alias came along, I knew I'd be OK if the show was on for five or six years because the writing was so good and the creative team was so strong."
- Victor Garber
(Related: Writing, Years)
"Reading Stephen King's book, On Writing, was like being cornered and forced to have a long, drawn out mental enema."
- Mary Garden
(Related: Being, Reading, Writing)
"In the back of my mind was the constant hankering, almost yearning, to write but something always stopped me in my tracks. Or if I did find my way to put a pen to paper or finger on a keyboard I'd give up after a few minutes. I'd find other things to do: Anything but writing."
- Mary Garden
(Related: Mind, Pen, Writing, Yearning)
"Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves."
- Jesse James Garrett
(Related: Experience, Work, Appreciation, Nothing, Writing)
"A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact."
- Marcus Garvey
(Related: Man, Reading, Woman, Writing)
"Getting even is one reason for writing."
- William H. Gass
(Related: Reason, Writing)
"You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length."
- Carl Friedrich Gauss
(Related: Time, Words, Writing)
"I started writing and photographing for different publications and finally ended up being the correspondent in South Asia, for the Geneva-based Journal de Geneve, which at one time used to be one of the best international newspapers in Europe."
- Francois Gautier
(Related: Time, Being, Europe, Newspapers, Writing)
"I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"I'm writing a review of three books on feminism and science, and it's about social constructionism. So I would say I'm a social constructionist, whatever that means."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Science, Books, Feminism, Writing)
"I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Anthropology, Literature, Research, Writing)
"If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Information, Language, Writer, Writing)
"I find it both fascinating and disconcerting when I discover yet another person who believes that writing can't be taught. Frankly, I don't understand this point of view."
- Elizabeth George
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps."
- Elizabeth George
(Related: Art, Wisdom, Talent, Encouraging, America, Dying, Footsteps, Necessity, Writers, Writing)
"Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing."
- Gil Gerard
(Related: Projects, Talk, Writers, Writing)
"The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today."
- Boutros Boutros Ghali
(Related: Change, Courage, Consideration, Forget, Needs, Reality, Today, Will, Writing)
"I'll have to get people to write songs for me right now until my own writing comes around."
- Andy Gibb
(Related: People, Now, Right, Songs, Writing)
"I love making records; I love making music; I love writing songs."
- Barry Gibb
(Related: Love, Music, Songs, Writing)
"When Maurice touched a keyboard, it was like something from a movie, magical. He would always give you something from a movie, and you'd go, what did you just play... immediately inspirational writings, amazing. That's what we're going to miss."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Inspirational, Play)
"I would never want to hurt anyone by writing a book."
- Kathie Lee Gifford
(Related: Hurt, Want, Writing)
"But when it comes to writing the thing that I've sort of been thinking about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do."
- Elizabeth Gilbert
(Related: Work, Earth, Thinking, Writing)
"You know what you are best at, and writing is just not my thing, but I like it."
- Sara Gilbert
(Related: Writing)
"Early on, it's good to develop the ability to write. Learning to write is a useful exercise, even if what you're writing about is not that relevant."
- Walter Gilbert
(Related: Ability, Exercise, Learning, Writing)
"The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Beauty, Dad, Life, Mom, Ballet, Baseball, Golf, Key, May, Writing)
"I can sit and analyze everything and beat myself up and say you don't quite sing as good as you used to, you're writing better songs maybe than you used to, but to me it's just the journey."
- Vince Gill
(Related: Journey, Songs, Writing)
"So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow."
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
(Related: Today, Tomorrow, Writing)
"I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media."
- Todd Gitlin
(Related: Experience, Politics, First, Media, Motive, Writing)
"I've been writing a lot, I've a few projects I'm trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing... Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I'd be thrilled."
- Paul M. Glaser
(Related: Finance, Acting, Golf, Projects, Trying, Writing)
"When I became more involved in music, I had to give up some of my writing in the literary sense. However, on occasion, I would write something for my own pleasure or I would write notes and introductory remarks in the songbooks I put together."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Music, Literary, Pleasure, Sense, Writing)
"When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers."
- Tom Glazer
(Related: Career, Songs, Will, Writing, Years)
"And in that I cannot send unto you all my businesses in writing, I despatch these present bearers fully informed in all things, to whom it may please you to give faith and credence in what they shall say unto you by word of mouth."
- Owen Glendower
(Related: Faith, May, Present, Word, Writing)
"The way they were writing Christine as this older woman who got married, which she shouldn't have. Obviously got divorced right away. Reached the glass ceiling in the police precinct. So there is a part of her that died because she knows she couldn't go any farther."
- Sharon Gless
(Related: Police, Right, Woman, Writing)
"And they were writing scripts where Christine had hit the glass ceiling. And I always thought Christine would never hit the glass ceiling. I thought her dreams would take her. Maybe her dreams wouldn't take her where she wanted, but she still had her dreams."
- Sharon Gless
(Related: Dreams, Thought, Writing)
"Now I'm fortunate to have a good band in CA, and play many solo gigs as well. My point is that I stopped playing in bands and played solo for four years, to get back into the groove and pulse of writing and singing and who I am on stage."
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Now, Play, Singing, Writing, Years)
"No, originally I thought that writing articles would keep me from having to see a psychiatrist, but I became even more depressed as a result."
- Theo Van Gogh
(Related: Thought, Result, Writing)
"Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction."
- Arthur Golden
(Related: Time, Mother, Thought, Fiction, Living, Reading, Writing)
"Television has raised writing to a new low."
- Samuel Goldwyn
(Related: Television, Writing)
"I want to keep doing different things. I'd like to do a more personal, dramatic movie next, I think. But as long as it's about characters and good writing and good parts for actors, that's what's important."
- Tony Goldwyn
(Related: Actors, Want, Writing)
"I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January."
- Genevieve Gorder
(Related: End, Summer, Will, Writing)
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area."
- Nadine Gordimer
(Related: Life, Work, Sense, Writing)
"I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else."
- Kim Gordon
(Related: Time, Thought, Idea, Play, Writing)
"I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working."
- Lesley Gore
(Related: Day, Writing)
"And I look forward to the time when I can become more indulgent with my songwriting. But this band is a family, and it's a process that we have to grow with together."
- Stone Gossard
(Related: Time, Family)
"When they do bring on new people, it's good for the show. It's like getting a new toy. The writers enjoy it because it's a whole new character that they can write for, one that they aren't used to writing for. They can try different things."
- Mark-Paul Gosselaar
(Related: People, Character, Writers, Writing)
"For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Country, Earth, Order, Sense, Writing)
"I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form."
- Sue Grafton
(Related: Career, Favorite, First, Literary, Mystery, Writing, Years)
"I focus on the writing and let the rest of the process take care of itself. I've learned to trust my own instincts and I've also learned to take risks."
- Sue Grafton
(Related: Trust, Care, Focus, Rest, Writing)
"Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can."
- Sue Grafton
(Related: Focus, Writing)
"I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since."
- Sue Grafton
(Related: First, Writing)
"All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content."
- Winston Graham
(Related: Content, Writing)
"When we finish this tour we are going to begin writing and go into the studio to hopefully have a brand new Foreigner album out in early spring next year. This will be the first Foreigner album out in about ten years."
- Lou Gramm
(Related: First, Spring, Will, Writing, Years)
"We still play Foreigner songs. I play the songs that I was involved in writing."
- Lou Gramm
(Related: Play, Songs, Writing)
"It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing."
- Lou Gramm
(Related: Time, Writing)
"I cling to the fantasy that I could have done something more creative. Like actually writing a script, or writing a book. But the awful truth is that I... probably can't!"
- Hugh Grant
(Related: Truth, Fantasy, Writing)
"I am drawn to writing and directing as it is most like the feeling I had when I was a teenager with my puppet theatre. You are more in control of everything and involved in every aspect of production, so more challenged and fulfilled."
- Richard E. Grant
(Related: Control, Feeling, Production, Theatre, Writing)
"Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time."
- Robert Graves
(Related: Time, Money, Idea, Poets, Public, Talking, Word, Writing, Wrong)
"I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad."
- Andrew Greeley
(Related: Disability, Learning, Now, Woman, Writing)
"No special writing rituals. And my desk is usually cluttered."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Rituals, Writing)
"I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Literature, Nothing, Physics, Pleasure, Worth, Writing)
"But I never listen to music while I'm writing."
- Stephen Greenblatt
(Related: Music, Writing)
"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Fear, Madness, Therapy, Wonder, Writing)
"I was thinking about doing another film at the same time, which was the sequel to Basic Instinct and I just had a feeling that wasn't going to happen. You know, I just kind of read the writing on the wall."
- Bruce Greenwood
(Related: Time, Feeling, Film, Instinct, Thinking, Writing)
"It's what the Pixies always said about music - they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it."
- Jonny Greenwood
(Related: Music, Motivation, Reading, Songs, Thinking, Trying, Writing)
"What is writing but an expression of my own life?"
- Zane Grey
(Related: Life, Expression, Writing)
"Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me."
- Zane Grey
(Related: Blood, Writing)
"This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing."
- Zane Grey
(Related: Writing)
"I did not have one bad spell during writing - an unprecedented record."
- Zane Grey
(Related: Writing)
"Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Animation, Writing)
"We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Funny, Bizarre, Now, Writers, Writing)
"Writing has become such an outlet for me that when I don't have it, I just get pent up."
- Emm Gryner
(Related: Writing)
"Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing."
- Val Guest
(Related: Money, Thought, Actor, Writing)
"Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter."
- Alma Guillermoprieto
(Related: Memory, Writing)
"If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that."
- Ursula K. Le Guin
(Related: Kids, Suicide, Want, Writing)
"My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call."
- Cathy Guisewite
(Related: Mother, Feelings, Eating, Kitchen, Sharing, Waiting, Writing, Wrong)
"I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style."
- James Gunn
(Related: Successful, Imitation, Style, Writing)
"I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Being, Class, Improvement, Result, Students, Writing)
"I was totally absorbed in the real world, the politics, the history, the news, and I just couldn't find my way into the fictional world... When I finally could return to writing the novel, it was in fits and starts."
- David Guterson
(Related: History, Politics, News, World, Writing)
"Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me."
- David Guterson
(Related: Money, Time, Thought, Habit, Being, Books, English, Thinking, Writers, Writing)
"When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer."
- David Guterson
(Related: Class, College, Writer, Writing)
"Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Energy, Writing)
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: American, Culture, Literary, Living, Poets, Teaching, Wonder, Writing)
"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Literature, states, Study, Theory, United, Writing)
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Idea, France, Novelty, University, Writing)
"The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Pleasure, Tension, Writing)
"There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Example, Language, Students, Vocabulary, Writing)
"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Investment, Writing)
"Writing with you is the only thing that keeps me alive."
- David Hackworth
(Related: Writing)
"When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me."
- Margaret Haddix
(Related: Being, Flexibility, Freedom, Writer, Writing)
"Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place."
- Margaret Haddix
(Related: First, Writing)
"Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it."
- Margaret Haddix
(Related: Perspective, Writing)
"I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Thought, Books, Children, Innocence, Writing)
"I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Hope, Being, Gay, Writer, Writing)
"Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Work, Writing)
"Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: People, Books, Forget, Writing)
"Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Books, Children, Respect, Writing)
"When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Children, Fiction, Right, Writing)
"I wasn't writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I'd listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We'd put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies."
- Sammy Hagar
(Related: Music, Writing)
"Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Music, Film, Theater, Writing)
"I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Love, Writing)
"95% of the album is my writing, by choice, because it seems to be what the distributors want."
- Merle Haggard
(Related: Choice, Want, Writing)
"Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly."
- Paul Haggis
(Related: Interest, Writing)
"We all have these tendencies in us that could go this way or that. I think that's the real key in writing. To look at a character without judgment."
- Paul Haggis
(Related: Character, Judgment, Key, Writing)
"No no there wasn't any planned 14th season, we all saw the writing on the wall. The ratings had been going down and so fourth, that curve goes on every show and in everybody's life."
- Larry Hagman
(Related: Life, Writing)
"When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before."
- Arthur Hailey
(Related: Travel, History, People, Writing)
"I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon."
- Corey Haim
(Related: Feelings, Habit, Thoughts, Learning, Trying, Writing)
"In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it."
- Alex Haley
(Related: Praise, Writing)
"I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Writing)
"Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Music, Shadows, Writing)
"My first semester, I got a D in creative writing."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: First, Writing)
"Painting and writing are solitary arts."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Painting, Writing)
"I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Illusion, Reading, Writing)
"It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music."
- Ayumi Hamasaki
(Related: Music, Work, Knowledge, Words, Writing)
"A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can."
- Edith Hamilton
(Related: Quality, People, Knowledge, Day, Literature)
"My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Detail, Style, Writing)
"I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Time, Books, First, Worry, Writing)
"I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: People, Fun, Talking, Want, Writers, Writing)
"I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Profession, Will, Writing)
"I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Science, People, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Research, Writing)
"I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive."
- Marvin Hamlisch
(Related: Music, Composers, Writing)
"The music is in the lead here, and a large part of this, I have no idea what I'm doing. I feel a closer bond with the craft of songwriting, stronger than I ever have."
- Ben Harper
(Related: Music, Idea)
"Each one of us had a little story to tell and each recording was based on that. Lou played all of the music but we both sort of kicked around some cords during the writing phase."
- Phil Harris
(Related: Music, Writing)
"My other advice is to start writing songs and singing right away."
- Jerry Harrison
(Related: Advice, Right, Singing, Songs, Writing)
"I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too."
- Jerry Harrison
(Related: Work, Self, Voice, Writing)
"Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints."
- Jim Harrison
(Related: Complaints, Problems, Woman, Writing)
"I really, really like writing songs."
- Debbie Harry
(Related: Songs, Writing)
"I found the writing arena to be much less competitive."
- Phil Hartman
(Related: Writing)
"When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"I want prose fiction to be recognized as that, and I'm not interested in writing as it becomes more personal."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Fiction, Prose, Want, Writing)
"For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change."
- John Hawkes
(Related: Change, Life, People, Character, Projects, Writing, Years)
"Pamphlets on Sabbath writing are in request here I have been applied to for them by several of the old Methodists knowing that I had them to sell before."
- John Hawley
(Related: Old, Sabbath, Writing)
"The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Related: Family, First, Friends, Literature, Writing)
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way."
- Colin Hay
(Related: Connection, Doubt, Fun, Leading, Man, Needs, Writing)
"Producing is hell, writing is frustrating, acting is really satisfying, directing is heaven."
- Salma Hayek
(Related: Acting, Heaven, Hell, Writing)
"I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward."
- Seamus Heaney
(Related: Joy, Reward, Writing)
"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."
- Jascha Heifetz
(Related: Composers, First, Play, Writing)
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
- Robert A. Heinlein
(Related: Writing)
"Every writer I know has trouble writing."
- Joseph Heller
(Related: Trouble, Writer, Writing)
"They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
- Lillian Hellman
(Related: Advice, Fancy, Talking, Writers, Writing)
"Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty."
- Lillian Hellman
(Related: Failure, Theater, Writing)
"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
- Lillian Hellman
(Related: Advice, Talking, Writers, Writing)
"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Being, Dignity, May, Water, Writer, Writing)
"I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Hope, Profanity, Will, Writing)
"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Deep, Night, Writing)
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Nothing, Writing)
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: People, Character, Living, Writer, Writing)
"Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Travel, Mind, Writing)
"Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music."
- Skitch Henderson
(Related: Music, Being, Guest, Popular, Stars, Writing)
"All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland."
- Jimi Hendrix
(Related: Words, Writing)
"The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi."
- Beth Henley
(Related: Christmas, Class, Night, Poor, School, Woman, Writing)
"I love writing for the screen."
- Beth Henley
(Related: Love, Writing)
"It certainly made a film writing career for me."
- Buck Henry
(Related: Career, Film, Writing)
"The band projects just took natural priority. I didn't really have a solo career, just wanted to share the music in another way and to learn more about writing, recording, etcetera."
- Ken Hensley
(Related: Music, Career, Projects, Writing)
"I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me."
- James Herriot
(Related: Love, Holidays, Job, Man, Writing)
"I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically."
- James Herriot
(Related: Fact, Writing)
"All human discoveries seem to be made only for the purpose of confirming more strongly the truths come from on high, and contained in the sacred writings."
- William Herschel
(Related: Purpose)
"The songs keep on writing themselves, and I really love them. It's as close as I get to a religion."
- Kristin Hersh
(Related: Love, Religion, Songs, Writing)
"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."
- Andy Hertzfeld
(Related: Work, People, Empathy, Key, Writing)
"We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh."
- Andy Hertzfeld
(Related: Manager, Development, Information, Project, Writing, Years)
"Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better."
- Herman Hesse
(Related: Cleverness, Patience, Thinking, Writing)
"It is not Kafka's fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature."
- Herman Hesse
(Related: People, Ability, Desire, Fault, Literature)
"Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity."
- Hermann Hesse
(Related: History, Books, Humanity, Words, Writing)
"I think it's just a lack of ability, we're incapable of writing hits."
- Kenny Hickey
(Related: Ability, Writing)
"If people have bought something of mine, they know by now that I will decline writing it for the movies."
- Patricia Highsmith
(Related: Movies, People, Now, Will, Writing)
"Well, of course it was a very trying time for me, and fortunately I had a lot of people who were supportive. A lot of people who were writing and calling and saying they were praying for me. Some people sent me Scripture, and that helped."
- Anita Hill
(Related: Time, People, Saying, Scripture, Trying, Writing)
"Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors."
- Ken Hill
(Related: Selling, Being, Song, Tools, Writing)
"Location is a very important aspect to songwriting."
- Ken Hill
"Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire."
- Napoleon Hill
(Related: Desire, Will, Writing)
"I get a great high from writing."
- Walter Hill
(Related: Writing)
"Since signing with Universal, I have been working closely with Gary Ross, the director, producer and screenwriter. We have spent many hours on the phone, and I've been sending him information and items that have been useful to the writing process."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Information, Writing)
"In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: History, Horses, Writing, Years)
"I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Work, Creativity, Fiction, Infinite, Potential, Writer, Writing)
"I had been writing professionally since 1988."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Writing)
"I identified in a very deep way with the individuals I was writing about because the theme that runs through this story is of extraordinary hardship and the will to overcome it."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Deep, Hardship, Will, Writing)
"I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading."
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Old, Reading, Will, Writing, Years)
"How can you stop writing?"
- Tony Hillerman
(Related: Writing)
"Men wholly bent on wordly treasures were the dupes of their own passions, rather than deceived by the writings or pretenses of those who claimed to be Alchemists."
- Ethan A. Hitchcock
(Related: Men)
"In this world of doubt, one thing is certain for me; that I will go on writing songs up to and - I hope, through heavenly means or diabolical - beyond the day I die."
- Robyn Hitchcock
(Related: Hope, Day, Doubt, Songs, Will, World, Writing)
"The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery."
- Ralph Hodgson
(Related: May)
"I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Time, Now, Writing)
"I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Language, Want, Writing)
"I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Film, Writing)
"After a while, the characters I'm writing begin to feel real to me. That's when I know I'm heading in the right direction."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Direction, Right, Writing)
"Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Time, Forget, Information, Writing)
"I did some writing and bought a book, and have been working on that as a film to act and direct in."
- Dustin Hoffman
(Related: Act, Film, Writing)
"I stopped working a few years ago because I just lost a spark that I'd had before. I thought I'd just try writing, and maybe start directing, but I did it very quietly."
- Dustin Hoffman
(Related: Thought, Writing, Years)
"He did once say the time to worry is when they stop writing about you but again I think that was pretty token of the coverage was very respectful, he rather resented the intrusions on his private life, but that was about it."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: Time, Life, Pretty, Worry, Writing)
"As somebody who's been writing about this subject for getting on twenty years now, it's astonishing how the climate has changed in the last five years."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: Climate, Now, Writing, Years)
"I suppose that if I could have quit, I would have, because in those days I never wanted to be an actress, the acting was something to do while I waited for a chance to study writing and directing. But I guess I was just meant to be an actress. Because, here I am."
- Judy Holliday
(Related: Acting, Chance, Study, Writing)
"The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV."
- Rupert Holmes
(Related: Truth, Earth, Songs, Writing)
"Actually when we stopped New Order I was busier than ever. The only gaps have been while we've been writing."
- Peter Hook
(Related: Order, Writing)
"I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love."
- Bell Hooks
(Related: Love, states, United, Writing)
"I really enjoy the therapeutic value of writing songs."
- Shannon Hoon
(Related: Songs, Value, Writing)
"Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away."
- Stephen Hopkins
(Related: Mystery, Writing)
"Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing."
- Horace
(Related: First, Sense, Writing)
"I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily."
- Laurence Housman
(Related: Thought, First, Letters, Writer, Writing)
"My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative."
- Laurence Housman
(Related: Art, Failure, Direction, Disappointment, First, Right, Training, Writing, Years)
"It was such a paradox for me that the only thing I know how to do is act, but that the first thing I abandoned while writing were the characters."
- Bryce Dallas Howard
(Related: Act, First, Paradox, Writing)
"It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Art, Education, Virtue, Culture, Writers, Writing)
"I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Advice, Writers, Writing)
"But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Idea, Environment, Feeling, Living, Man, Today, Writing)
"I shall stick to my resolution of writing always what I think no matter whom it offends."
- Julia Ward Howe
(Related: Resolution, Writing)
"I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs."
- Glenn Hughes
(Related: Art, Love, People, Songs, Will)
"Now, I am completely independent - I earn my living by speaking and writing."
- Karen Hughes
(Related: Living, Now, Writing)
"Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?"
- Evan Hunter
(Related: Writing)
"I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot."
- Evan Hunter
(Related: Art, Artist, Navy, Reading, Sea, Writing)
"I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute."
- Evan Hunter
(Related: Age, Work, Development, Day, First, Running, Sons, Writing)
"Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene."
- Evan Hunter
(Related: Change, Writer, Writing)
"I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not."
- Fannie Hurst
(Related: Writing)
"If we took Chaucer's writings at face value, we'd have to conclude he was a complete drip."
- John Hutton
(Related: Value)
"I hate thinking about it, teaching about it, and writing about it. But the plain truth is that hell is real and real people go there for eternity."
- Bill Hybels
(Related: Truth, People, Eternity, Hate, Hell, Teaching, Thinking, Writing)
"The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen."
- Lee Iacocca
(Related: Discipline, First, Writing)
"The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Software, Today, Writing)
"I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark."
- Vanilla Ice
(Related: Anger, Music, Anxiety, Depression, Stress, Writing)
"This was totally influenced by me and the direction that I am writing about and the stuff that I am writing about. There is just no way that you can be as intense as what I have been through in my life over a drum beat machine, sample, or loop; it's just not going to happen."
- Vanilla Ice
(Related: Life, Direction, Machine, Writing)
"I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write - I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Wife, Reading, Writing)
"I think all writing is done through memory."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Memory, Writing)
"What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Reading, Writer, Writing)
"No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writing)
"I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
"American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: American, Literature, Writing)
"I mean Gorilla was really our first sort of goes at songwriting."
- Neil Innes
(Related: First)
"I took acting lessons when I was 19, 20, and I had my writing."
- Michael Ironside
(Related: Acting, Writing)
"When I was still in prep school - 14, 15 - I started keeping notebooks, journals. I started writing, almost like landscape drawing or life drawing. I never kept a diary, I never wrote about my day and what happened to me, but I described things."
- John Irving
(Related: Life, Day, School, Writing)
"Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties."
- John Irving
(Related: Victims, Writing)
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
- John Irving
(Related: Life, Talent, Writer)
"I think I'm in a really nice position, where I'm sure I could do another show if I wanted to do one, but right now the main thing in my mind is writing songs."
- Chris Isaak
(Related: Mind, Now, Right, Songs, Writing)
"I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Fiction, Songs, Writer, Writing)
"What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Life, Now, Promotion, Public, Writer, Writers, Writing)
"My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: People, Friends)
"Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Memory, Writing)
"Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well."
- David Ives
(Related: Play, Writing)
"I really was a fan of his and always have been - his writing especially, you know? I think people a lot of times overlook that part, because he kind of got into that party character so heavy."
- Alan Jackson
(Related: People, Character, Party, Writing)
"Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time."
- LaToya Jackson
(Related: Time, People, Want, Writing)
"People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me."
- LaToya Jackson
(Related: Family, People, American, Healing, Writing)
"I very much dislike writing about myself or my work, and when pressed for autobiographical material can only give a bare chronological outline which contains no pertinent facts."
- Shirley Jackson
(Related: Work, Facts, Writing)
"The journalism school helped me develop writing skills, and I had been enjoying cartooning from a very young age. My interest in puppetry, however, came much later."
- William Jackson
(Related: Age, Interest, Journalism, School, Writing)
"The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages."
- Fredric Jameson
(Related: Home, War, Achievement, Effort, End, states, United, World, World war, Writing)
"I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Cinema, Writer, Writing)
"I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Feeling, Future, Influence, Will, Writing)
"I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Eternity, Feeling, Want, Writing)
"I liked Sartre's views but not his writing."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Writing)
"While writing my first 90 books, I was magazine editor, publisher, book publisher, executive, etc., so I was established in publishing. three of my seven or so books were biographies of sports stars and really opened doors for me in that area."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Sports, Books, First, Publishing, Stars, Writing)
"Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Poetry, Prose, Writing)
"I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: First, Writing)
"Just the type of music that was around at the same time as I was writing. Some of it was wicked, definitely. But there was just one direction which I thought could be pushed that no one was pushing."
- Tom Jenkinson
(Related: Music, Time, Thought, Direction, Writing)
"My history is really playing live - not writing or recording."
- Tom Jenkinson
(Related: History, Writing)
"Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical."
- Derrick Jensen
(Related: Writing)
"For many years I was engaged in journalism, writing articles and chronicles for the daily press without ever joining the staff of any newspaper."
- Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
(Related: Journalism, Press, Writing, Years)
"I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Music, Women, Now, Reason, Songs, Writing)
"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Thought, American, Writing)
"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."
- Denis Johnson
(Related: Ocean, Writing)
"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
- Diane Johnson
(Related: End, Job, Understanding, Writer, Writing)
"Writing is a creatively rewarding occupation but for me very time consuming."
- Holly Johnson
(Related: Time, Occupation, Writing)
"Maybe I've lost a little, but I think everyone does over time. People have been writing that I'm getting old every year, and eventually they're going to be right. There's nobody in this game that's doing the same things they once did in the peak years of their career."
- Randy Johnson
(Related: Time, People, Career, Old, Right, Writing, Years)
"I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane."
- Kelly Jones
(Related: Idea, Ritual, Road, Songs, Writing)
"I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home."
- Quincy Jones
(Related: Home, Music, University, Writing)
"There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge."
- Erica Jong
(Related: Women, Knowledge, Class, Feeling, Writing)
"I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am."
- Erica Jong
(Related: Style, Writing)
"The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet."
- June Jordan
(Related: Music, Time, Language, Obvious, Writing)
"Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law."
- June Jordan
(Related: Sister, Brother, Habits, Language, Law, Lying, Schools, Self, Speech, Writing)
"It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing."
- Neil Jordan
(Related: Writing)
"I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing."
- Neil Jordan
(Related: Film, Writing)
"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."
- James Joyce
(Related: English, Public, Reading, Reason, Writing)
"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."
- Norton Juster
(Related: Experience, People, Perception, Cities, Kids, Writing)
"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters."
- Norton Juster
(Related: Conversation, End, Writing)
"Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Business, Computer, Lonely, Words, Writers, Writing)
"It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Dream, Idea, Night, Waking, Writing)
"I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Fiction, Personality, Respect, Writers, Writing)
"I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Love, Life, Comedy, Horror, Smile, World, Writing)
"My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Travel, Exploration, First, Literature, Reading, Reflection, Writing)
"I'm trying to put more elements of the essay into my writing."
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
(Related: Trying, Writing)
"Is there something to be said for the writings of the Marquis? Is there something to be said for pornography? And is there something to be said against both? I hope our film is balanced and rich enough to encourage debate and discussion."
- Philip Kaufman
(Related: Hope, Debate, Film, Pornography)
"For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live."
- Maynard James Keenan
(Related: Life, Writing)
"Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing."
- Jonathan Kellerman
(Related: Time, Months, Questions, Research, Writing, Years)
"That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing."
- Jonathan Kellerman
(Related: Money, Reason, Want, Writers, Writing)
"Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good."
- Thomas a Kempis
(Related: Public, Reading, Writing)
"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on."
- Jack Kerouac
(Related: Fault, Theories)
"When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around."
- Ken Kesey
(Related: Lie, Shakespeare, Writing)
"Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing."
- Ken Kesey
(Related: America, Writing)
"The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: Learning, Right, Writing)
"People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: People, Nonsense, Writing)
"At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: Day, End, First, Want, Writing)
"I think if the writing comes too easily, it shows - it's usually hard to read."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself."
- Jewel Kilcher
(Related: Goal, First, Writing)
"I don't exist without writing."
- Jewel Kilcher
(Related: Writing)
"We influence singing but never really songwriting."
- Charles King
(Related: Influence, Singing)
"I think there are some songwriters who are just brilliant who can write and then I think there are some songwriters who can like me I have a problem writing chorus lyrics but I can write a song in a story like that."
- Charles King
(Related: Song, Writing)
"I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff."
- Charles King
(Related: Care, Now, Writing)
"Writing this book was very therapeutic because it helped me face my relationship with my dad."
- Dexter S. King
(Related: Dad, Writing)
"I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book."
- Sally Kirkland
(Related: Will, Writing)
"If I'm grumpy I sure do enjoy writing The Walking Dead."
- Robert Kirkman
(Related: Walking, Writing)
"I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look."
- Robert Kirkman
(Related: Trouble, Writing)
"Novel writing should never be confused with journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Primary Colors, a fair number of journalists confused."
- Joe Klein
(Related: Colors, Journalism, Writing)
"So it took me five years because in the interim I have been doing a lot of personal appearances and movies and some television series that went into the plumbing and I stopped writing for a while."
- Robert Klein
(Related: Movies, Television, Writing, Years)
"When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Day, Freedom, Newspapers, Writing)
"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."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Fun, Self, Writing)
"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Writing)
"The biggest hurdle to writing Fargo Rock City was that I couldn't afford a home computer - I had to get a new job so I could buy a computer. It could all change though. In five years, I could be back at some daily newspaper, which wouldn't be so bad."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Change, Home, Computer, Job, Writing, Years)
"I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Experience, People, Writing)
"Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Sensibility, Writing)
"We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore."
- Alexander Kluge
(Related: Books, Contradiction, Television, Want, Writing)
"I never really saw myself as writing science fiction anyway."
- Nigel Kneale
(Related: Science, Fiction, Writing)
"I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human."
- Shirley Knight
(Related: Learning, Writing)
"Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing."
- David Knopfler
(Related: Business, Life, Control, Act, Effort, Now, Space, Writing)
"Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing."
- Mark Knopfler
(Related: Life, Laws, Song)
"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Writing)
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: People, Entertainment, Struggle, Support, Writers, Writing)
"Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: Love, Pain, Pleasure, Writing)
"I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: Fear, Desire, Talking, Will, Writing)
"I think if you are writing an instrumental you are dealing with more of an aesthetic in a sense but a lyric is more of a putting yourself on the line and a much more expensive exercise."
- Leo Kottke
(Related: Exercise, Sense, Writing)
"At that time, I had recently finished a book called Amazing Grace, which many people tell me is a very painful book to read. Well, if it was painful to read, it was also painful to write. I had pains in my chest for two years while I was writing that book."
- Jonathan Kozol
(Related: Time, People, Grace, Writing, Years)
"In the book, I write about children in first grade who were taught to read by reading want ads. They learned to write by writing job applications. Imagine what would happen if anyone tried to do that to children in a predominantly white suburban school."
- Jonathan Kozol
(Related: Children, First, Job, Reading, School, Want, Writing)
"You know, I've sung a lot of emotional songs in my life, but when you're writing it yourself, it's very difficult to decide what to reveal."
- Diana Krall
(Related: Life, Songs, Writing)
"When we first started playing in the early days, none of us really had any idea about writing our own songs yet. We were struggling how to learn our instruments and play songs to be able to perform for people."
- Wayne Kramer
(Related: People, Idea, First, Play, Songs, Writing)
"You get on the radio by writing your own songs. But we had the dilemma of not being able to play anywhere because we weren't able to play anything that anyone wanted to hear. So we learned songs that we thought that we could do without puking."
- Wayne Kramer
(Related: Thought, Being, Play, Songs, Writing)
"Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Life, Reason, Writing)
"I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Fiction, Fun, Writing, Years)
"I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine."
- Judith Krantz
(Related: Dating, Experience, Men, College, Fashion, Fiction, Housekeeping, Job, Writing, Years)
"I never sit down to write. When I'm moved, I do it. I just wait for it to come. You just hear it. I can't really describe writing. It's in my head."
- Lenny Kravitz
(Related: Writing)
"The flattery is nice, but awards don't add up to writing quality songs."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Quality, Awards, Flattery, Songs, Writing)
"If I'm writing strictly for others, how does that show what I'm experiencing or thinking? I just got to a point where I realized I could be as personal as I wanted to be and people could relate to those situations if they so choose."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: People, Thinking, Writing)
"I think it's important to really press on with the song writing and just go with it. There's no code, there's no craft... it's just let yourself shine through your music. If it's meant to be loved and heard, it'll happen."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Music, Press, Song, Writing)
"I'm not writing just about melancholy stuff anymore, I made a point to cover a wide range of emotions."
- Chantal Kreviazuk
(Related: Emotions, Melancholy, Writing)
"Schools are really bad now. Schools are not only bad in reading, writing and arithmetic, they're worse in cultural aspects, like in music and art. They don't teach you anything."
- John Kricfalusi
(Related: Music, Art, Arithmetic, Now, Reading, Schools, Writing)
"The storyboard department doesn't talk to the layout department, which doesn't talk to the writing department. They're all jealous of each other."
- John Kricfalusi
(Related: Talk, Writing)
"In old movies, the cinematography is a thousand times better than anything today. Writing, a thousand times better."
- John Kricfalusi
(Related: Movies, Old, Today, Writing)
"I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Reading, Writing)
"TV critics, who traditionally hate television and make their living writing about it, often didn't like what I did on the air."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Hate, Living, Television, Writing)
"People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life."
- Neil LaBute
(Related: Life, Money, Work, People, Therapy, Visit, Writing)
"Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters."
- Jacques Lacan
(Related: Flying, Letters)
"I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book."
- Mercedes Lackey
(Related: Work, Events, Writing)
"And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: People, Sense, Tradition, Writing)
"When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Idea, Writing)
"I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them."
- Jhumpa Lahiri
(Related: Reading, Right, Writing)
"I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Character, First, Writing)
"I like to be surprised. The best writing is when it defies me, when it starts going a different way than I had planned."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Writing)
"However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Fiction, May, Pretty, Writers, Writing)
"The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander."
- Walter Savage Landor
(Related: Posterity, Writing)
"Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it."
- Rose Wilder Lane
(Related: Life, Quality, Effort, Fiction, Killing, Writing)
"I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?"
- Philip Larkin
(Related: People, Popularity, Unhappiness, Writing)
"Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature."
- Steig Larsson
(Related: Entertainment, Light, Literature, Propaganda, Question, Writing)
"I have been threatened occasionally. But that happens to everybody who is writing this kind of things. Threats will come without fail. It might happen to the most 'innocent' texts. If it gets too much we call the police."
- Steig Larsson
(Related: Police, Will, Writing)
"We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good."
- James Laughlin
(Related: People, Hope, Office, Promise, Will)
"When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs."
- Margaret Laurence
(Related: Jobs, Writing)
"It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle."
- Christine Lavin
(Related: Business, Time, Goals, Losing, Sight, Songs, Struggle, Trying, Writing)
"The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself."
- Linda Lavin
(Related: Power, Time, Actor, Chance, Play, Writing)
"The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written."
- Jerome Lawrence
(Related: Soul, Mind, Writing)
"The aftermath of the war is what inspired us to write many of our plays. The whole reason for our writing Inherit the Wind was that we were appalled at the blacklisting. We were appalled at thought control."
- Jerome Lawrence
(Related: War, Thought, Control, Reason, Wind, Writing)
"I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing."
- Jerome Lawrence
(Related: Enthusiasm, Writing)
"I am never going to write for the sake of writing."
- Emma Lazarus
(Related: Writing)
"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
- Stephen Leacock
(Related: Ideas, Simplicity, Writing)
"I've grown tremendously as an actor by being there. It is comic writing the likes of which I don't know that I'll ever see again and it's been a great, great experience."
- Matt LeBlanc
(Related: Experience, Actor, Being, Writing)
"Comedy is just to me, maybe it's a natural knack, if I can see where the joke is in the writing and I can see where the setup is and I can tell this is the way to make it."
- Matt LeBlanc
(Related: Comedy, Writing)
"And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun."
- Matt LeBlanc
(Related: Work, Comedy, Fun, Writing)
"Now I'm kind of established as a director, I much prefer directing to writing."
- Ang Lee
(Related: Now, Writing)
"I would like to shift more into writing for and producing people."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: People, Writing)
"It's hard for me to just practice without writing something."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Practice, Writing)
"Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Elderly, Production, Projects, Will, Writing, Years)
"That is what intrigues me; songwriting and song structure and expression."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Expression, Song)
"I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word."
- Geddy Lee
(Related: Love, Sense, Word, Writing)
"God is love, but get it in writing."
- Gypsy Rose Lee
(Related: God, Love, Writing)
"Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?"
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"It's very selfish when I write. I'm not aware, ever, of writing for another person; I'm not even really aware of writing for myself."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Writing)
"If they had said my writing wasn't good enough, fair enough, that's an opinion. But to say it's too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Intelligence, Insult, Opinion, Writing)
"I've been criticised for writing in too complex a manner for younger people."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: People, Writing)
"I just love writing. It's magical, it's somewhere else to go, it's somewhere much more dreadful, somewhere much more exciting. Somewhere I feel I belong, possibly more than in the so-called real world."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Love, World, Writing)
"I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Men, Women, Writing)
"I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!"
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Love, Writing)
"Writing, producing and directing, I must say, is incredibly satisfying and gratifying. I've never been happier."
- Jennifer Jason Leigh
(Related: Writing)
"Songwriting is kind of like a craft. It's not something that just comes in a dream. You've got to work at it."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Work, Dream)
"For me, songwriting is something I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day."
- Sean Lennon
(Related: Inspiration, Day)
"My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Death, Father, Play, Writing)
"When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot."
- Ruggero Leoncavallo
(Related: Idea, Horror)
"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer."
- Doris Lessing
(Related: Life, Work, Truth, Hard work, Writer, Writing)
"In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better."
- Doris Lessing
(Related: Writing)
"Fantastic writing in English is kind of disreputable, but fantastic writing in translation is the summit."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: English, Writing)
"I'd excluded New York from my writing, and then I came back and I fell in love with it all over again. The energy comes from an absence, that yearning for New York when you are not there."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Love, Absence, Energy, Writing, Yearning)
"I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Space, Writing)
"I don't paint anymore. I haven't since I abandoned it at 19, in order to begin writing seriously."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Order, Writing)
"Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home."
- Philip Levine
(Related: Home, Poetry, Nothing, Now, Will, Writing)
"Rush has never been a spontaneous group. We may be spontaneous in our writing, we may be spontaneous as individuals in our day to day lives... certainly I think am and always have been, but I think when it comes to Rush and our presentation of our music it's quite controlled."
- Alex Lifeson
(Related: Music, Day, May, Writing)
"Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
(Related: Day, Flowers, Prayer, Quiet, Saying, Sense, Writing)
"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
(Related: Being, Living, Thinking, Writing)
"At school I was always trying to con my teachers into letting me act out book reports instead of writing them."
- Laura Linney
(Related: Act, School, Teachers, Trying, Writing)
"They change. They're different. There are no two alike, that's the miracle of it. But if they have something to teach the students. You can see them writing during the show."
- James Lipton
(Related: Change, Students, Writing)
"The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, Pleasure, Writing)
"You learn a lot, writing fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Importance, Names, Old, Reading, Writing)
"I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, May, Writing)
"Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Business, Lonely, Memories, Obsessions, Rest, World, Writing)
"When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs."
- George Lloyd
(Related: Old, Songs, Thinking, Writing)
"Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in."
- Kurt Loder
(Related: Style, Writer, Writing)
"Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor."
- Kurt Loder
(Related: Job)
"Of mediumship there are many grades, one of the simplest forms being the capacity to receive an impression or automatic writing, under peaceful conditions, in an ordinary state; but the whole subject is too large to be treated here."
- Oliver Joseph Lodge
(Related: Impression, Being, State, Writing)
"My overnight success was really 15 years in the making. I'd been writing songs since I was 6 and playing in bands and performing since I was 14."
- Lisa Loeb
(Related: Success, Songs, Writing, Years)
"It won't be long before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there."
- Frederick Loewe
(Related: Hope, Writing)
"I make no claim to be an authority on writing or illustrating for children."
- Hugh Lofting
(Related: Authority, Children, Writing)
"I honestly feel like we never had a bad episode by TV standards. Every week I felt there were so many strong components of the show, especially the writing."
- Donal Logue
(Related: Writing)
"Right now we're in the process of writing new material for a new record."
- Dave Lombardo
(Related: Now, Right, Writing)
"I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing."
- Walter Lord
(Related: Writing)
"Rock is all about writing your own script; it's all about pioneering."
- Courtney Love
(Related: Writing)
"I'm not going to hurt anybody other than that dick who keeps writing songs about me."
- Courtney Love
(Related: Hurt, Songs, Writing)
"We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It's frightening. I can't see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections."
- Chris Lowe
(Related: Company, Writing)
"And how is clarity to be achieved? Mainly by taking trouble and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them."
- F. L. Lucas
(Related: People, Clarity, Trouble, Writing)
"He took me from not being able to write a word in terms of writing screenplays to being the king of wooden dialogue."
- George Lucas
(Related: Being, Word, Writing)
"I'm always in that mode - whenever I have a little free time, I'm always recording songs, writing, whatever I gotta do. It's like my job is my vacation."
- Ludacris
(Related: Time, Job, Songs, Vacation, Writing)
"Now, when I was in the Army, writing was my hobby."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Army, Now, Writing)
"I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Ideas, Writing)
"You have to feel more involved than just writing out a cheque. Charity is almost the wrong word - I think people are beginning to feel more responsible for the world."
- Joanna Lumley
(Related: People, Beginning, Charity, Word, World, Writing, Wrong)
"I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry."
- Norman MacCaig
(Related: Poetry, Writing)
"When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself."
- Shane MacGowan
(Related: Pleasure, Song, Writing)
"Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people."
- Hugh Mackay
(Related: People, Goal, Class, Reading, Writing)
"The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Joy, Writing)
"You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out."
- Mary MacLane
(Related: Genius, Thought, Heart, May, Writing)
"I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing."
- Alistair Maclean
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development."
- Norman Macleod
(Related: Development, Character, Children, Writing)
"So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors."
- Patrick Macnee
(Related: Love, Acting, Actors, Skill, Writing)
"I'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing."
- William H. Macy
(Related: Writing)
"The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers."
- Bryan Magee
(Related: Curiosity, Interest, Philosophy, World)
"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Money, Literature, Nothing, Writing)
"I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Love, Thought, Books, Reading, Writing)
"Writing for young children I find I often use particular jokes with words and exaggerated, funny events, but some of these haunt the more complex stories for older children too."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Funny, Children, Events, Jokes, Words, Writing)
"When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Books, Writing)
"I, personally, have found reading a continual support to writing."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Reading, Support, Writing)
"I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Work, Character, Style, Writers, Writing)
"I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Time, Being, Support, Writer, Writing)
"I don't think I prefer writing for one age group above another. I am just as pleased with a story which I feel works well for very small children as I do with a story for young adults."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Age, Children, Writing)
"Every writer has to find their own way into writing."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Act, Being, Reading, Writing)
"Alimony is the curse of the writing class."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Class, Writing)
"The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Baby, Being, Difference, Television, Writing)
"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Men, Books, Writing)
"The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing."
- Henry James Sumner Maine
(Related: Art, Discovery, Writing)
"Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing."
- Bernard Malamud
(Related: Writing)
"Writing and Painting are the same for me."
- Peter Malkin
(Related: Painting, Writing)
"And I love writing; I've been writing ever since I was seven."
- Jena Malone
(Related: Love, Writing)
"By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching."
- Albert Maltz
(Related: Time, College, Discrimination, First, Question, Writing)
"The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Nature, Act, Writing)
"Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best."
- Chuck Mangione
(Related: Writing)
"I think if one wants to be in a continual state of insanity one should stay married to that writing partner."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Insanity, State, Writing)
"Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Successful, Ability)