Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 12

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 12 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Zadie Smith
Don’t romanticise your ‘vocation’. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle’. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Jim Crace
Retiring from writing is not to retire from life, but retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product, in almost every case.
- Jim Crace
Collection: Writing
Image of Maurice Sendak
As an aspiring artist, you should strive for originality of vision. Have something to say and a fresh way of saying it. No story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it’s not the work of the imagination.
- Maurice Sendak
Collection: Writing
Image of Kirby Larson
I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.
- Kirby Larson
Collection: Writing
Image of Billy Boyd
I'd like to win a Booker Prize for writing. A Nobel Peace Prize for my work in peace... and I think that'll probably do.
- Billy Boyd
Collection: Writing
Image of Rebecca Solnit
Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.
- Rebecca Solnit
Collection: Writing
Image of Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Once I got started, I wanted the life of a writer so fiercely that nothing could stop me. I wanted the intensity, the sense of aliveness that came from writing fiction. I'm still that way. My life is worth living when I've completed a good paragraph.
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Ray Pollock
I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.
- Donald Ray Pollock
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Ray Pollock
I do think they [French] view my writing itself as exotic - though that's probably not the best term for it - to a small extent, mainly because I say things that most French writers would probably hesitate to say for fear of offending someone or upsetting public sensibilities. I don't think that answers the question, but I'm not much good at figuring readers out or I would probably be writing bestsellers.
- Donald Ray Pollock
Collection: Writing
Image of R. A. Salvatore
If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.
- R. A. Salvatore
Collection: Writing
Image of Barbara Tuchman
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose.
- Barbara Tuchman
Collection: Writing
Image of Gene Stratton-Porter
You cannot write on the heart of another what you do not feel yourself.
- Gene Stratton-Porter
Collection: Writing
Image of Bharati Mukherjee
[On her writing agenda:] Make the familiar exotic; the exotic familiar.
- Bharati Mukherjee
Collection: Writing
Image of Henry Cloud
Whatever's happening today, remember it is only ONE SCENE in a long movie. Don't treat it like it's the whole story. Keep writing the story.
- Henry Cloud
Collection: Writing
Image of Marjane Satrapi
Drawing is the first language of the human being before writing. It's a transcription of how the human being sees reality, not reality itself.
- Marjane Satrapi
Collection: Writing
Image of Erlend Loe
I have the strangest thoughts in my head, maybe I should not write them down.
- Erlend Loe
Collection: Writing
Image of Barbara Mertz
The only way to do it is to do it: by writing, writing, writing.
- Barbara Mertz
Collection: Writing
Image of Sharon Van Etten
It's hard if you're just touring constantly. It's like, "What am I going to write about? I'm in the van, I'm playing another show..." I'm still writing about heartbreak that happened years ago. I don't see the point of writing and putting out another record until I can do something else.
- Sharon Van Etten
Collection: Writing
Image of Taylor Momsen
I write about what I know, what I live, what I observe.
- Taylor Momsen
Collection: Writing
Image of Walter Murch
Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.
- Walter Murch
Collection: Writing
Image of Osamu Dazai
As for love . . . no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
- Osamu Dazai
Collection: Writing
Image of Maggie Smith
Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but I came out on the side of light more often than not.
- Maggie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Hannibal Buress
If you want to do anything, you got to go do it. Perform a lot, write a lot, make yourself better. Use the Internet, make videos, create content.
- Hannibal Buress
Collection: Writing
Image of Rosemary Clement-Moore
Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it’s the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the story.
- Rosemary Clement-Moore
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard M. Nixon
Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.
- Richard M. Nixon
Collection: Writing
Image of Colin Wilson
It is far easier to write an angry letter than to go and say angry things to another person - because as soon as we look in one another's faces we can see the other point of view.
- Colin Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Amy Bloom
Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.
- Amy Bloom
Collection: Writing
Image of Ed Sheeran
The more you write tunes, the better they will become. The more you do gigs, the better you will become. It’s just kind of like the facts of life; the practice makes perfect thing. Keep your fingers crossed, start from the bottom and work your way up.
- Ed Sheeran
Collection: Writing
Image of David Henry Hwang
To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.
- David Henry Hwang
Collection: Writing
Image of David Henry Hwang
It's the stories that make my heart beat faster ...those are the ones to write about
- David Henry Hwang
Collection: Writing
Image of David Henry Hwang
Yes, I am one of those people who feels that most of my work is adaptation of one sort or another. For me, it's a way to jump-start the engine. For example, some people use the technique of basing a character on a friend. They start writing with his or her voice, then at a certain point, the character takes off on his or her own. It probably no longer resembles the model, but it helped the author to get going. I find that's true of form, too. For every play I've written, I know what play I was trying to imitate. That helps me get going.
- David Henry Hwang
Collection: Writing
Image of Jackie French
I do read very, very quickly. I do process data very quickly. And so I write very quickly. And it is embarrassing because there is a conception that the things that you do quickly are not done well. I think that's probably one of the reasons I don't like the idea of prolific.
- Jackie French
Collection: Writing
Image of Peter David
As for jokes, I don't think it's necessarily that what I write is funny.
- Peter David
Collection: Writing
Image of Harry Turtledove
You can write better about a place you've seen for yourself. You don't have to have been there - I've sure written about places I've never seen - but it does help.
- Harry Turtledove
Collection: Writing
Image of Harry Turtledove
I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.
- Harry Turtledove
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Brisbane
If you don't hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
- Arthur Brisbane
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Brisbane
Writing good editorials is chiefly telling the people what they think, not what you think.
- Arthur Brisbane
Collection: Writing
Image of Josephine Tey
Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!
- Josephine Tey
Collection: Writing
Image of Robin Maxwell
If you find a way to write with open heart to Diary, a friend with Truth, no detail spared, your tome like Petrarch’s works will contain the scattered fragments of your soul.
- Robin Maxwell
Collection: Writing
Image of Andrew O'Hagan
I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.
- Andrew O'Hagan
Collection: Writing
Image of Andrew O'Hagan
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
- Andrew O'Hagan
Collection: Writing
Image of Dorianne Laux
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
- Dorianne Laux
Collection: Writing
Image of Dorianne Laux
I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.
- Dorianne Laux
Collection: Writing
Image of Jess Walter
The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.
- Jess Walter
Collection: Writing
Image of Jess Walter
You take something from your past that you're somewhat ashamed about and you write about it from another character's point of view.
- Jess Walter
Collection: Writing
Image of Edgar Winter
I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.
- Edgar Winter
Collection: Writing
Image of Mildred D. Taylor
I do not know how old I was when the daydreams became more than that, and I decided to write them down, but by the time I entered high school, I was confident that I would one day be a writer.
- Mildred D. Taylor
Collection: Writing
Image of Winona Ryder
I write pretty much every day, but I don't have any desire to publish anything.
- Winona Ryder
Collection: Writing
Image of Spider Robinson
When writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence...in love, never settle...value yourself first and this will help you to value others...life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest...everyone in the world is different, and that's ok.
- Spider Robinson
Collection: Writing