Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 148

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 148 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Carl Sagan
Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.
- Carl Sagan
Collection: Writing
Image of Simone de Beauvoir
‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
- Simone de Beauvoir
Collection: Writing
Image of Gao Xingjian
I want to write a novel so profound that it would suffocate a fly.
- Gao Xingjian
Collection: Writing
Image of Rick Riordan
Kids, if anything, are harder to write for because they are a more discerning audience. They will not stay with you if you go off on a tangent or if you give them extraneous information that doesn't serve the story. You really have to tell a tight story. You have to give them humor and suspense and believable characters. All those things that adults want too, but you have to be really on your game when you're writing for kids.
- Rick Riordan
Collection: Writing
Image of Susanna Kaysen
It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.
- Susanna Kaysen
Collection: Writing
Image of Lewis Black
I never write anything down. I write onstage.
- Lewis Black
Collection: Writing
Image of Ambrose Bierce
GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These [quills] when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling.
- Ambrose Bierce
Collection: Writing
Image of Ambrose Bierce
A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.
- Ambrose Bierce
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand - but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Elie Wiesel
Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.
- Elie Wiesel
Collection: Writing
Image of Frank Zappa
I write the music I like. If other people like it, fine, they can go buy the albums. And if they don't like it, there's always Michael Jackson for them to listen to.
- Frank Zappa
Collection: Writing
Image of Michel de Montaigne
The only good histories are those that have been written by the persons themselves who commanded in the affairs whereof they write.
- Michel de Montaigne
Collection: Writing
Image of Bill Moyers
Fate handed Barack Obama the best of all political gifts - a dyspeptic, surly, spiteful opposition on the one hand and very unpopular financiers on the other - and he wouldn't come out punching, name names, or go for the jugular. It was as if while getting mugged by guys with brass knuckles, he turned the other cheek. He even jeopardized his pledge to preserve women's rights under Roe v. Wade in order to get a health care bill written by the corporate lapdog Max Baucus and the gang of revolving door mercenaries he hired to write a bill friendly to industry.
- Bill Moyers
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Miller
As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.
- Arthur Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Miller
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
- Arthur Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Miller
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
- Arthur Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Calvin Trillin
There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later.
- Calvin Trillin
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Waits
I'm trying to learn how to write faster.
- Tom Waits
Collection: Writing
Image of David Bowie
I don't like to read things that people write about me. I'd rather read what kids have to say about me, because it's not their profession to do that.
- David Bowie
Collection: Writing
Image of J. K. Rowling
I'll be writing until I can't write anymore. It's a compulsion with me. I love writing.
- J. K. Rowling
Collection: Writing
Image of J. K. Rowling
You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.
- J. K. Rowling
Collection: Writing
Image of Edward Abbey
I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
- Edward Abbey
Collection: Writing
Image of Vita Sackville-West
however many resolutions one makes, one's pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can't write in any way other than one's own.
- Vita Sackville-West
Collection: Writing
Image of Vita Sackville-West
[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.
- Vita Sackville-West
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Joseph Brodsky
If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.
- Joseph Brodsky
Collection: Writing
Image of Joseph Brodsky
I didn't want to be either the cre`me de la cre`me or a martyr. I'd rather be a novelty, especially in a democracy that doesn't understand the language I write in.
- Joseph Brodsky
Collection: Writing
Image of Joseph Brodsky
Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.
- Joseph Brodsky
Collection: Writing
Image of Gloria Steinem
I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.
- Gloria Steinem
Collection: Writing
Image of Haruki Murakami
You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.
- Haruki Murakami
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Simmons
I think at the age of 50, everyone should write their own autobiography.
- Richard Simmons
Collection: Writing
Image of Ian Somerhalder
When you look at the sheer volume of paper usage in the U.S. alone, it's truly frightening: paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, writing paper. Our consumption of trees is endless.
- Ian Somerhalder
Collection: Writing
Image of Neal Stephenson
The story is everything, so it always begins with a story.And research is a kind of scaffolding built underneath the story as I go along. My enjoyment level varies, but in general, I'm writing about topics I find interesting, so I can't gripe too much.
- Neal Stephenson
Collection: Writing
Image of Neal Stephenson
The less attractive the character, the more I enjoyed writing them. Officious bureaucrats and PowerPoint weasels are where it's at for me.
- Neal Stephenson
Collection: Writing
Image of Woodrow Wilson
Wilson was once asked how long it took him to write a speech. He answered, 'That depends. If I am to speak 10 minutes, I need a week for preparation. If 15 minutes, 3 days. If half hour, two days. If an hour, I am ready now.'
- Woodrow Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Irvine Welsh
These days you can't write anybody off. If anybody is a right-wing populist, you can't write them off now because that is the rising tide of our time.
- Irvine Welsh
Collection: Writing
Image of Irvine Welsh
As a writer, you play this daft game with yourself - you're constantly looking for distractions, anything to stop you from writing, but you're constantly fighting the distractions to write as well.
- Irvine Welsh
Collection: Writing
Image of Fernando Pessoa
When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
- Fernando Pessoa
Collection: Writing
Image of Fernando Pessoa
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
- Fernando Pessoa
Collection: Writing
Image of Chuck Berry
Actually I'm writing as best I can, in order to keep the momentum and the career there, but I want to live.
- Chuck Berry
Collection: Writing
Image of William Faulkner
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
- William Faulkner
Collection: Writing
Image of William Faulkner
Read, read read. Read everything.
- William Faulkner
Collection: Writing
Image of Toni Morrison
I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.
- Toni Morrison
Collection: Writing
Image of Toni Morrison
...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.
- Toni Morrison
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Twain
The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.
- Mark Twain
Collection: Writing