Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 161

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 161 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Philip Pullman
Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.
- Philip Pullman
Collection: Writing
Image of Ringo Starr
Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.
- Ringo Starr
Collection: Writing
Image of Ringo Starr
I've been asked to write my autobiography and really they only want 8 years (1962-1970), and I keep saying it would be five volumes before I even got into the band!
- Ringo Starr
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
The two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don't like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
When I feel I'm going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Arundhati Roy
My writing is translated into every Indian language, it's distributed in pamphlets, in little private video things, it's everywhere. So it's a lovely pastime for the middle class to think of itself as the whole nation.
- Arundhati Roy
Collection: Writing
Image of Andy Rooney
The one affectation I have forced on the publisher... are my apostrophe-free ellisions. Because I write my scripts to read myself, I dont spell 'don't' with an apostrophe. I spell it 'dont'. We all know the word and it seems foolish to put in an extraneous apostrophe. Punctuation marks are devices we use to make the meaning of sentences clear. There is nothing confusing about a word like 'dont' printed without an apostrophe to indicate an omitted letter.
- Andy Rooney
Collection: Writing
Image of Garth Nix
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.
- Garth Nix
Collection: Writing
Image of Chris Ware
Storytelling is one of comics' esthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist's problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of "writing," the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience. As far as I'm concerned, that's really all I've been trying to do formally for the past decade or more with comics, and it's certainly time-consuming, since it has to be done with drawings, not words.
- Chris Ware
Collection: Writing
Image of Chris Ware
As I get older I find myself thinking about stories more and more before I work so that by the time I eventually sit down to write them, I know more or less how it's going to look, start or feel. Once I do actually set pencil to paper, though, everything changes and I end up erasing, redrawing and rewriting more than I keep. Once a picture is on the page I think of about ten things that never would have occurred to me otherwise. Then when I think of the strip at other odd times during the day, it's a completely different thing than it was before I started.
- Chris Ware
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
What you write chooses you.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of August Wilson
The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.
- August Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of August Wilson
. . . what happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
- August Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Robbins
Get yourself in that intense state of being next to madness. Keep yourself in, not necessarily a frenzied state, but in a state of great intensity. The kind of state you would be in before going to bed with your partner. That heightened state when you're in a carnal embrace: time stops and nothing else matters. You should always write with an erection. Even if you're a woman.
- Tom Robbins
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Robbins
Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.
- Tom Robbins
Collection: Writing
Image of Cynthia Ozick
If ideas are what feed serious literature and arresting language, who today is writing a novel of ideas (which can often mean comedy)? I think of Joshua Cohen. Who else?
- Cynthia Ozick
Collection: Writing
Image of Cynthia Ozick
Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.
- Cynthia Ozick
Collection: Writing
Image of Kevin Hearne
Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.
- Kevin Hearne
Collection: Writing
Image of Harold Pinter
I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else. No one particularly. Just if I could put the pen down on paper and suddenly come out in a totally different way.
- Harold Pinter
Collection: Writing
Image of Harold Pinter
I'm not committed as a writer, in the usual sense of the term, either religiously or politically. And I'm not conscious of any particular social function. I write because I want to write. I don't see any placards on myself, and I don't carry any banners.
- Harold Pinter
Collection: Writing
Image of Rod Serling
In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.
- Rod Serling
Collection: Writing
Image of Rod Serling
I don't feel, God dictated that I should write.
- Rod Serling
Collection: Writing
Image of Rod Serling
If you're really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read, and you'll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you're just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won't make it in writing.
- Rod Serling
Collection: Writing
Image of Rod Serling
Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story.
- Rod Serling
Collection: Writing
Image of Rod Serling
I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.
- Rod Serling
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
I guess I think I'm writing for people who are smarter than I am, because then I'll be doing something that's worth their time. I'd be very afraid to write from a position where I consciously thought I was smarter than most of my readers.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
Writing is a mysterious activity.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Vladimir Nabokov
I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times.
- Vladimir Nabokov
Collection: Writing
Image of R. A. Salvatore
The most common criticism that I've seen is that I write "popcorn fantasy": lightweight action-adventure. Some people call it that as they explain why they love it for exactly that reason. I'm cool with that, either way. I just nod and let it go.
- R. A. Salvatore
Collection: Writing
Image of Kevin Spacey
I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.
- Kevin Spacey
Collection: Writing
Image of Doreen Virtue
The reason that I'm considered to be prolific is just because I'm a good listener. It literally is me taking dictation when I write. I'm listening and typing as fast as I'm hearing the words.
- Doreen Virtue
Collection: Writing
Image of Steve Almond
I've felt pressure to produce long fiction for as long as I've been writing fiction. There's just an incredible bias in the publishing industry toward novels and away from short stories. They're seen as D.O.A. in the marketplace, which seems nuts to me, given that various collections done smashingly and deservedly well in economic terms.
- Steve Almond
Collection: Writing
Image of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Collection: Writing
Image of Yani Tseng
I write down inspirational things on cards that I keep in my bag and look at during the round.
- Yani Tseng
Collection: Writing
Image of Evelyn Waugh
Words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.
- Evelyn Waugh
Collection: Writing
Image of Chris Hardwick
Jokes that make me laugh out loud when I write them almost always bomb. I have no idea why.
- Chris Hardwick
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvia Plath
I've got to have something. I want to stop it all, the whole monumental grotesque joke, before it's too late. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
- Sylvia Plath
Collection: Writing
Image of Karen Russell
I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do. So, it's usually not too, too hard.
- Karen Russell
Collection: Writing
Image of Karen Russell
And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.
- Karen Russell
Collection: Writing
Image of Karen Russell
It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
- Karen Russell
Collection: Writing
Image of Shania Twain
I think that all people that get to a certain level of their celebrity are brands. I accept that. I don't value it in any personal way. I value it as an element of my work. I'm more pragmatic in that sense. I do get very rattled if I don't get enough normalcy in my life. I like solitude. I can't even write music if I'm not isolated.
- Shania Twain
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
Certainly, for me, and it's gone this way on every project I've worked on, the "writing" never ends until you're done with the movie.
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
I had written four scripts before I wrote Recount. Each one progressed my career a little bit, but I didn't make a dime off any of them. Recount was the first thing I sold, and I actually sold it as a pitch to HBO. They bought it as a pitch, which was a miracle. I thought, "Wow, this could be the last time I'll be paid to write a script again, which would be too bad because that was an amazing experience I just had."
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
I read an interview with Aaron Sorkin and he said he plays every part when he's writing. I thought, "Oh, I do that too! I'm doing okay."
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
I find that when people get a script, they know within five pages if the writer can write. Once you're five pages in, it doesn't matter whose name is on the cover, you're not even thinking about it.
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
I started writing when I was 26, so I don't even know what year that was. I wrote a script for me to star in. A friend of mine, who was an actor that I would compete against a lot, had written a script and was taking all these meetings. He just kept pushing me and was like, "You got to do it. You're going to love it!" He's a very successful screenwriter now. His name is Michael Bacall and he wrote 21 Jump Street, Project X, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. So it was a few factors.
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing