Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 112

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 112 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Donald Ray Pollock
As for how I feel about any success I've had, I just feel extremely lucky. Writing is a tough racket, and there are a lot of writers out there better than me who can't seem to catch a break.
- Donald Ray Pollock
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Tyler
I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.
- Anne Tyler
Collection: Writing
Image of Michel de Montaigne
It is not my deeds that I write down, it is myself, my essence.
- Michel de Montaigne
Collection: Writing
Image of Bill Mollison
When the idea of permaculture came to me, it was like a shift in the brain, and suddenly I couldn't write it down fast enough.
- Bill Mollison
Collection: Writing
Image of Ben Stiller
It's what I wanted to do with my life. Not necessarily just direct Jim Carrey movies, but to direct and act and write and create and along the way discover what it is that I'm about.
- Ben Stiller
Collection: Writing
Image of Charlie Brooker
In the U.K. I'm probably better known as a comedy writer - or certainly that's my background is in writing comedy.
- Charlie Brooker
Collection: Writing
Image of Charlie Brooker
In comedy writing, a sitcom plot is basically the same thing: What's the worst thing that could happen? But you're playing it for comic effect. It's a similar muscle being used with Black Mirror.
- Charlie Brooker
Collection: Writing
Image of George Orwell
Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.
- George Orwell
Collection: Writing
Image of Julia Quinn
Happy endings are all I can do. I wouldn't know how to write anything else.
- Julia Quinn
Collection: Writing
Image of John Pilger
Since September 11, the Mirror has reached back to its roots, and decided, it seems, to be something of its old self again. I received a call asking if I would write for it again, which I've done. It's a pleasure to be able to do that. It's become an important antidote to a media that is, most of it, supportive of the establishment, some of it quite rabidly rightwing. The Mirror is breaking ranks, and that's good news.
- John Pilger
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Bowen
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.
- Elizabeth Bowen
Collection: Writing
Image of Tao Lin
If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.
- Tao Lin
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Ian Black
I think writing for anybody helps you order your life. It helps you arrange your emotions and your thoughts and it helps to provide perspective.
- Michael Ian Black
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Virginia Woolf
I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.
- Virginia Woolf
Collection: Writing
Image of John Steinbeck
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
- John Steinbeck
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
I find in most novels no imagination at all. They seem to think the highest form of the novel is to write about marriage, because that's the most important thing there is for middle-class people.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of John Waters
I have no interest in ever making a movie I didn't write. If they were going to take my house away, then I guess I might have to. But my agent knows not to even bother sending me the scripts.
- John Waters
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
There was a message written in pencil on the tiles by the roller towel. This was it: What is the purpose of life? Trout plundered his pockets for a pen or pencil. He had an answer to the question. But he had nothing to write with, not even a burnt match. So he left the question unanswered, but here is what he would have written, if he had found anything to write with: To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Bill Watterson
As "Calvin and Hobbes" went on, the writing pushed the drawings into greater complexity. One of the jokes I really like is that the fantasies are drawn more realistically than reality, since that says a lot about what's going on in Calvin's head.
- Bill Watterson
Collection: Writing
Image of Carl Reiner
You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.
- Carl Reiner
Collection: Writing
Image of John Dos Passos
Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Writing
Image of Oscar Wilde
George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
- Oscar Wilde
Collection: Writing
Image of Saul Bellow
A writer is in the broadest sense a spokesman of his community. Through him that community comes to know its heart. Without such knowledge, how long can it survive?
- Saul Bellow
Collection: Writing
Image of Harold Brodkey
You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.
- Harold Brodkey
Collection: Writing
Image of Bill Shankly
I have been received more warmly by Everton than I have by Liverpool. It is scandalous that I should have to write these things about the club that I helped build into what it is today.
- Bill Shankly
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Bly
You say to yourself, Well, this poem isn't going to be any good, but I'll write it anyway.
- Robert Bly
Collection: Writing
Image of William Faulkner
Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.
- William Faulkner
Collection: Writing
Image of Toni Morrison
Sometimes what I write on the page frightens me, so I feel free when I write, but I don't feel safe.
- Toni Morrison
Collection: Writing
Image of Frank Zappa
Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn't mean you've reached them.
- Frank Zappa
Collection: Writing
Image of Katherine Paterson
What I really want to do is to write a hilarious farce.
- Katherine Paterson
Collection: Writing
Image of Charles Spurgeon
We are too prone to engrave our trials in marble and write our blessings in sand.
- Charles Spurgeon
Collection: Writing
Image of May Sarton
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
- May Sarton
Collection: Writing
Image of John Steinbeck
Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
- John Steinbeck
Collection: Writing
Image of John Steinbeck
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
- John Steinbeck
Collection: Writing
Image of Neal Stephenson
What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.
- Neal Stephenson
Collection: Writing
Image of Paul Simon
Much of songwriting is simply a mystery.
- Paul Simon
Collection: Writing
Image of Sara Paretsky
It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating
- Sara Paretsky
Collection: Writing
Image of John Updike
Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.
- John Updike
Collection: Writing
Image of Fernando Pessoa
Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.
- Fernando Pessoa
Collection: Writing
Image of James Patterson
The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you.
- James Patterson
Collection: Writing
Image of Keanu Reeves
There's a lot of great writing, and characters, and stories being told in television nowadays. And much more than there used to be. The opportunities to tell stories, because of the opportunities to show content. And so it's drawing actors from cinema, movie actors, actors to where there's a lot of opportunities to where you can tell stories.
- Keanu Reeves
Collection: Writing
Image of Rebecca West
It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.
- Rebecca West
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Trump
Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals. Preferably big ones.
- Donald Trump
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing