Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 164

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 164 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Ray Bradbury
People try to force things. It's disastrous. Just leave your mind alone. Your intuition knows what it wants to write, so get out of the way.
- Ray Bradbury
Collection: Writing
Image of Ray Bradbury
Sometimes you have intuitive insight about how you think things are going to be, and you write that. Other times you fantasize completely, which has nothing to do with predicting the future.
- Ray Bradbury
Collection: Writing
Image of Ray Bradbury
Science fiction is a great way to pretend you are writing about the future when in reality you are attacking the recent past and the present. You can criticize communists, racists, fascists or any other clear and present danger, and they can't imagine you are writing about them.
- Ray Bradbury
Collection: Writing
Image of Howard Zinn
History is instructive. And what it suggests to people is that even if they do little things, if they walk on the picket line, if they join a vigil, if they write a letter to their local newspaper. Anything they do, however small, becomes part of a much, much larger sort of flow of energy. And when enough people do enough things, however small they are, then change takes place.
- Howard Zinn
Collection: Writing
Image of Judy Blume
I like to read fiction best and I like to write fiction, too.
- Judy Blume
Collection: Writing
Image of Judy Blume
I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.
- Judy Blume
Collection: Writing
Image of Judy Blume
When you ask, did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.
- Judy Blume
Collection: Writing
Image of Jon Stewart
I think of myself as a comedian who has the pleasure of writing jokes about things that I actually care about, and that's really it. I have great respect for people who are in the front lines and the trenches of trying to enact social change, but I am far lazier than that.
- Jon Stewart
Collection: Writing
Image of Louise Penny
A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.
- Louise Penny
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Moon
Most eyes have more than one color, but usually they're related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and gray, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don't notice that. When I first went to get my state ID card, the form asked for eye color. I tried to write in all the colors in my own eyes, but the space wasnt big enough. They told me to put 'brown'. I put 'brown', but that is not the only color in my eyes. It is just the color that people see because they do not really look atr other people's eyes.
- Elizabeth Moon
Collection: Writing
Image of Neil deGrasse Tyson
I can tell you that in my modern life I enjoy language. I enjoy words, their meaning, what they sound like to the ear, what they sound like to the listener. I strive to write the perfect sentence in all that I do, and when I write [the] perfect sentence I know it. If I had a second life I'd be a librettist for Broadway musicals.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Collection: Writing
Image of Neil deGrasse Tyson
Why can't Pluto be a planet? Some people like Pluto. And if it doesn't exist then they don't have a favorite planet. Right? Please write back but not in cursive because I can't read cursive.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Collection: Writing
Image of Edna O'Brien
For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.
- Edna O'Brien
Collection: Writing
Image of Jason Schwartzman
I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.
- Jason Schwartzman
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Roiphe
I don't really think it comes as a shock to every writer if somebody in their family is mad at them. Yes, it's very upsetting. But it's inherent in the process of trying to make sense of one's life, which is what I think is perhaps at the bottom of writing at all.
- Anne Roiphe
Collection: Writing
Image of Seneca the Younger
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
- Seneca the Younger
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvester Stallone
With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.
- Sylvester Stallone
Collection: Writing
Image of Josephine Tey
There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.
- Josephine Tey
Collection: Writing
Image of Harold Bloom
The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.
- Harold Bloom
Collection: Writing
Image of Ann Voskamp
I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.
- Ann Voskamp
Collection: Writing
Image of Wendell Berry
It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.
- Wendell Berry
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Simmons
You've probably heard about the theory of steam-engine time - that even after the steam engine had been invented, it had to wait until people were ready to make use of it. The same thing happens in literary circles. The truth is, I'm not terribly interested in Victorian times; I'm interested in Victorian writers. I'm interested in most eras of history, but not the Victorian Era especially. I was interested in the John Franklin Expedition. I was interested in these last five weird years of Dickens' life. And I just have to take the age that comes with all that when I write about it.
- Dan Simmons
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Simmons
There are many other writers whose work I admire tremendously, but none whose work struck me at just the right young age. Jack Vance taught me that speculative fiction, science fiction, could be wonderfully and liberatingly stylistic. It didn't have to be pulp stuff. He really changed my writing and my view of science fiction, so if nothing else, my little homage to him in the novelette I wrote for that anthology is my thank-you to him. He helped me see that any genre can have excellent writing in it.
- Dan Simmons
Collection: Writing
Image of William Butler Yeats
No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
- William Butler Yeats
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Morton
People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.
- Kate Morton
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Morton
I love the structural part of the writing process.
- Kate Morton
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvia Plath
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
- Sylvia Plath
Collection: Writing
Image of Larry Niven
Never be embarrassed or ashamed by anything you choose to write.
- Larry Niven
Collection: Writing
Image of Ann Brashares
Besides being asked why I write about young characters, I am often asked how I write about young characters. How do I throw myself across the chasm of full adulthood to relive that period? I guess I don’t, really. Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.
- Ann Brashares
Collection: Writing
Image of Lauren Oliver
Additionally, Liesl and Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic--not a paycheck, certainly; not an idea, even; and not an escape. Actually, it is the opposite of an escape; it is a way back in, a way to enter and make sense of a world that occasionally seems harsh and terrible and mystifying. (From the "Author's Note" at the end).
- Lauren Oliver
Collection: Writing
Image of Cesare Pavese
When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
- Cesare Pavese
Collection: Writing
Image of William Saroyan
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
- William Saroyan
Collection: Writing
Image of William Saroyan
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
- William Saroyan
Collection: Writing
Image of William Saroyan
Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.
- William Saroyan
Collection: Writing
Image of Joss Whedon
If I find out I have to write today and nothing else, that’s a perfect day. I know a lot of people who are great at it and make it look easy who are tortured and miserable people. Writing for me is perfect peace.
- Joss Whedon
Collection: Writing
Image of Joss Whedon
Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.
- Joss Whedon
Collection: Writing
Image of Wilhelm Wundt
In the course of normal speaking the inhibitory function of the will is continuously directed to bringing the course of ideas and the articulatory movements into harmony with each other. If the expressive movement which which follows the idea is retarded through mechanical causes, as is the case in writing ... such anticipations make their appearance with particular ease.
- Wilhelm Wundt
Collection: Writing
Image of Adrienne Rich
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
- Adrienne Rich
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Twain
The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.
- Mark Twain
Collection: Writing
Image of Sam Shepard
It's hard to explain why exactly, but I think that when I began writing plays, it was from an actor's point of view more than anything. I had the feeling that if you put yourself in the position of the actor on stage and write from that perspective, it would give you a certain advantage in terms of being inside of the play.
- Sam Shepard
Collection: Writing
Image of Sam Shepard
Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
- Sam Shepard
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of Jorge Luis Borges
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
- Jorge Luis Borges
Collection: Writing
Image of James Agee
I'll do what little I can in writing. Only it will be very little. I'm not capable of it; and if I were, you would not go near it at all. For if you did, you would hardly bear to live
- James Agee
Collection: Writing
Image of Shashi Tharoor
In writing of Indian culture, I am highly conscious of my own subjectivity; arguably, there is more than one Indian culture, and certainly more than one view of Indian culture.
- Shashi Tharoor
Collection: Writing