Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 158

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 158 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Susan Sontag
The writers or artists I write about are not necessarily those I care most about (Shakespeare is still my favourite writer) but those whose work I feel has been neglected.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
When you see your 40-page essay turned into a "hot tip" in one paragraph in Newsweek, you get anxious about the way your writing has been used.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
When you are writing, you are - from society's point of view - only producing the first version which will then be processed and recycled.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
In a lot of writing or intellectual discourse we're starting to use that model: "Oh, this is where it comes from!" I would like to concentrate on work which is more resistant to that procedure, as I think fiction is.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
I'm extremely interested in the Russian formalists and have been for many years. I'm more drawn to their writing, which is expressive and literary, than to writing which is extremely academic or jargon-ridden.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Warren
The banks lobbied Washington so they could write the rules that got us into this crisis. They then lobbied Washington to get the money to bail them out. And then they are lobbying Washington to write the rules so they can get us into the next crisis. It's perfect circularity.
- Elizabeth Warren
Collection: Writing
Image of Errol Morris
Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.
- Errol Morris
Collection: Writing
Image of Vladimir Nabokov
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Writing
Image of Omar N. Bradley
Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work.
- Omar N. Bradley
Collection: Writing
Image of Joseph Addison
Hudibras has defined nonsense, as Cowley does wit, by negatives. Nonsense, he says, is that which is neither true nor false. These two great properties of nonsense, which are always essential to it, give it such a peculiar advantage over all other writings, that it is incapable of being either answered or contradicted.
- Joseph Addison
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
You can't really succeed with a novel anyway; they're too big. It's like city planning. You can't plan a perfect city because there's too much going on that you can't take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Nepo
To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.
- Mark Nepo
Collection: Writing
Image of David Sedaris
I mean, I'm always happy if I have, like, humiliating asshole things that I did. I think: Oh good, that's a good story. Because if you write about humiliating asshole things other people do it doesn't work as well. I mean, you can, but you can get away with it better if you talk about what an asshole you are. It's much easier.
- David Sedaris
Collection: Writing
Image of Gene Wolfe
You do not characterize by telling the reader about the character. You do it by showing the character thinking, speaking and acting in a characteristic way. You simply show it and shut up.
- Gene Wolfe
Collection: Writing
Image of Gene Wolfe
Do not start a story unless you have an ending in mind. You can change the story's ending if you wish, but you should always have a destination.
- Gene Wolfe
Collection: Writing
Image of Gene Wolfe
Some writers say they cannot write in front of a window; many say they cannot function without almost perfect quiet. A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.
- Gene Wolfe
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Pullman
If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
- Philip Pullman
Collection: Writing
Image of Carl Sandburg
Beware of advice-even this.
- Carl Sandburg
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Orben
It always seems to someone outside the business that it is very difficult to write for a comedy show because it must be done quickly. Actually, it is much easier to write this humor than to do a joke or a show from scratch, because the audience knows the plot. Just mention what is going on and then deliver the punch line.
- Robert Orben
Collection: Writing
Image of Arundhati Roy
I stand by what I write and follow through on what I write.
- Arundhati Roy
Collection: Writing
Image of Andy Rooney
It's not so much that I write well, I just don't write badly very often and that passes for good on television.
- Andy Rooney
Collection: Writing
Image of Andy Rooney
I am not retiring. Writers don't retire. Writers never stop writing.
- Andy Rooney
Collection: Writing
Image of August Wilson
There's no reason why you can't say "August Wilson, playwright" even though all of my work, every single play, is about black Americans, about black American culture, about the black experience in America. I write about the black experience of men, or I write about black folks. That's who I am. In the same manner that Chekhov wrote about the Russians, I write about blacks. I couldn't do anything else. I wouldn't do anything else.
- August Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of August Wilson
If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.
- August Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
There is much to admire in Peter Brett's writing, and his concept is brilliant. There's action and suspense all the way.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Chris Ware
Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines?
- Chris Ware
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Schumann
We may be sure that a genius like Mozart, were he born today, would write concertos like Chopin and not like Mozart.
- Robert Schumann
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Penn Warren
All I've tried to do (with my writing) is capture the essence of my time.
- Robert Penn Warren
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Pratchett
The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.
- Terry Pratchett
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Pratchett
It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.
- Terry Pratchett
Collection: Writing
Image of Taylor Swift
Sometimes when relationships end, you write an e-mail and say everything you wish you said. Sometimes you don't push send.
- Taylor Swift
Collection: Writing
Image of Mel Brooks
No creative writer knows what is commercial and what isn't. You just write from your heart, you write from the deepest, creative urges in you, and you write from your soul, and you just either get lucky or not.
- Mel Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Alanis Morissette
There is no better feeling than when you write something you know is a piece of you and that, at some point, is going to communicate with someone else.
- Alanis Morissette
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Shermer
Ultimately all hominids came from Africa, and therefore everyone in America should simply check the box next to 'African-American.' My maternal grandmother was German and my maternal grandfather was Greek. The next time I fill out one of those forms I am going to check 'Other' and write in the truth about my racial and cultural heritage: 'African-Greek-German-American.' And proud of it.
- Michael Shermer
Collection: Writing
Image of Joni Mitchell
Lazy reviewers look up other people's reviews and they write the same thing, so you get people writing crap based on crap.
- Joni Mitchell
Collection: Writing
Image of George Orwell
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.
- George Orwell
Collection: Writing
Image of George Orwell
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
- George Orwell
Collection: Writing
Image of H. G. Wells
No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document.
- H. G. Wells
Collection: Writing
Image of Billy Bob Thornton
I generally have lyrics first, but you can't help that when you're writing lyrics you start to get a melody in your head. So they come kind of simultaneously.
- Billy Bob Thornton
Collection: Writing
Image of Melissa Rosenberg
The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.
- Melissa Rosenberg
Collection: Writing
Image of Mary Roberts Rinehart
it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.
- Mary Roberts Rinehart
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
This is what I find encouraging about the writing trades: ... They allow lunatics to seem saner than sane.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing