Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 17

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 17 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of André Brink
Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.
- André Brink
Collection: Writing
Image of Anthony Trollope
The habit of writing clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe critic to himself.
- Anthony Trollope
Collection: Writing
Image of Millard Kaufman
She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.
- Millard Kaufman
Collection: Writing
Image of Howard Nemerov
Writing is like the relationship with your bowels. First you can, then you can't. Finally, you must. Only then should you reach for the paper.
- Howard Nemerov
Collection: Writing
Image of Howard Nemerov
The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present -henceforth?- the subject to which you are condemned.
- Howard Nemerov
Collection: Writing
Image of Graham Swift
If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive-then don't be a writer.
- Graham Swift
Collection: Writing
Image of Stef Penney
I don't think I could write about someone I didn't feel some sympathy for.
- Stef Penney
Collection: Writing
Image of Stef Penney
Initially I only decided to try and write a novel because I wasn't getting enough screenwriting work. It wasn't a long-held ambition, and certainly the idea came first.
- Stef Penney
Collection: Writing
Image of Stef Penney
Because I work quite slowly, I have to keep myself interested over a long research and writing period. So I can't see myself writing about modern middle-class Londoners anytime soon.
- Stef Penney
Collection: Writing
Image of Boss Tweed
Stop them damn pictures! I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see the pictures!
- Boss Tweed
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephan Pastis
When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.
- Stephan Pastis
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephan Pastis
Sticking to my schedule, Ive gotten over seven months ahead, which allowed me to write a Pearls Before Swine movie script for the big screen.
- Stephan Pastis
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephan Pastis
A stand-up comedian faces the audiences and gets their immediate feedback. I hide behind the comic strip, and unless people write to me, I dont know what they think.
- Stephan Pastis
Collection: Writing
Image of James Broughton
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
- James Broughton
Collection: Writing
Image of Bernard DeVoto
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
- Bernard DeVoto
Collection: Writing
Image of Matt Mullenweg
Historically, WordPress has been purely focused on the writing side. However, were thinking about mobile completely differently, and I think theres a big opportunity to take the community of creators that loves WordPress and deliver an audience to the amazing things theyre making.
- Matt Mullenweg
Collection: Writing
Image of Nikolai Berdyaev
The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.
- Nikolai Berdyaev
Collection: Writing
Image of Nizar Qabbani
And the writing is still : to you, with you, about you, because of you and for you.
- Nizar Qabbani
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Brooks
You can get away with breaking all of the other rules at least once in a while, but you can't get away with breaking this one. Readers will accept almost anything from you if you don't make them feel they have wasted their time and money. Remember, you can bore readers in a lot of different ways. It doesn't necessarily take a dearth of action; too much action can get you the same result. Everything in writing, like in life, requires balance.
- Terry Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Antoine Rivarol
It is easy for men to write and talk like philosophers, but to act with wisdom, there is the rub!
- Antoine Rivarol
Collection: Writing
Image of Nick Bantock
Letter writing is an excellent way of slowing down this lunatic helterskelter universe long enough to gather one’s thoughts
- Nick Bantock
Collection: Writing
Image of Nick Bantock
I do what I want to do. I see where my enthusiasm is. Over the years, my techniques expanded. That's how the writing came out.
- Nick Bantock
Collection: Writing
Image of Igor Stravinsky
Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.
- Igor Stravinsky
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Rice
If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less.
- Anne Rice
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Stone
I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.
- Robert Stone
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Stone
One does not consider style, because style is.
- Robert Stone
Collection: Writing
Image of Vincent Price
We exponents of horror do much better than those Method actors. We make the unbelievable believable. More often than not, they make the believable unbelievable.
- Vincent Price
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Collection: Writing
Image of Bill Burr
I've found is that by doing stand-up, I've actually learned how to combat depression. I don't have clinical, but I've definitely had my bouts with it. I just figured out that it's a choice. You're in control of your brain. When your brain is sending you bad information or bad thoughts, you can decide to go to the gym, or write a new joke - or if you're on the road, go to a ball game... something that's going to get the blood going. Or you can let those thoughts take you right down the rabbit hole.
- Bill Burr
Collection: Writing
Image of Patricia A. McKillip
I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places.
- Patricia A. McKillip
Collection: Writing
Image of James L. Brooks
The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.
- James L. Brooks
Collection: Writing
Image of Libba Bray
Write like it matters, and it will.
- Libba Bray
Collection: Writing
Image of Tracy Letts
Well, one of the things we're supposed to be able to do as playwrights is write from a place of empathy, get into another character's shoes and experience things both mundane and tragic. And people don't - like me right now - people aren't necessarily the most eloquent when trying to express their emotions. I guess I feel as a playwright that those people deserve a voice, too, a voice that isn't so articulate that they themselves can no longer identify with it.
- Tracy Letts
Collection: Writing
Image of Tracy Letts
I never know what the hell I'm writing about, I never know what the next thing I'm writing about is, I never have a plan.
- Tracy Letts
Collection: Writing
Image of Len Wein
I've always been the audience that I wanted to reach, so I write for myself.
- Len Wein
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvia Plath
I write only because There is a voice within me That will not be still
- Sylvia Plath
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Roth
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
- Philip Roth
Collection: Writing
Image of Sophie Hannah
I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just dont understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.
- Sophie Hannah
Collection: Writing
Image of Nami Mun
I just have to come clean and admit I am an extremely, painfully slow writer. I have this unfortunate - or fortunate, I'm not sure which is correct - habit of editing while I'm writing which everyone tells me that I shouldn't do that. But that's just the way I write and I think it's important to stay true to your own writing style and momentum.
- Nami Mun
Collection: Writing
Image of Amos Oz
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
- Amos Oz
Collection: Writing
Image of Amos Oz
I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies. I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another. I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.
- Amos Oz
Collection: Writing
Image of Jerry Spinelli
Whom do I write for? I write for the story. Each story, it seems to me, knows best how it should be told. As I once put my ear to the railroad track, I listen now for the voice of my story.
- Jerry Spinelli
Collection: Writing
Image of Eloisa James
Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision.
- Eloisa James
Collection: Writing
Image of William Allen White
Dip your pen into your arteries and write.
- William Allen White
Collection: Writing
Image of William Allen White
Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
- William Allen White
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Roiphe
What other people think of me is not really my major concern in life. What other people think of what I write is another matter.
- Anne Roiphe
Collection: Writing