Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 235

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 235 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Stephen King
Writing is like a little hole in reality that you can go through and you can get out and you can be someplace else for a while.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of C. S. Lewis
The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.
- C. S. Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of Norman Lear
I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.
- Norman Lear
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
People seem to think there's a magic formula to writing, i just write 1 word at a time.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all .... as long as you tell the truth.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
There are moments when I am writing when I think that if other people knew how I felt right now, they’d burn me at the stake for feeling so good, so full, so much intense pleasure.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Lisa Kleypas
Shaw...has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?" "Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.
- Lisa Kleypas
Collection: Writing
Image of Tony Kushner
I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.
- Tony Kushner
Collection: Writing
Image of Barbara Kingsolver
There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
What is writing? Writing is telepathy.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: 'If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.'
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Jonathan Lethem
I don't write about anything I don't love even if that love sometimes gets all screwed up and tormented.
- Jonathan Lethem
Collection: Writing
Image of Zoe Lister-Jones
I always loved writing as a tool of expression.
- Zoe Lister-Jones
Collection: Writing
Image of Zoe Lister-Jones
Writing becomes a really good creative outlet when you're sitting there and feeling creatively frustrated or stilted, but also you then get to write parts for yourself.
- Zoe Lister-Jones
Collection: Writing
Image of Madeleine L'Engle
When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
- Madeleine L'Engle
Collection: Writing
Image of Georg C. Lichtenberg
Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
Collection: Writing
Image of Tyra Banks
My nutritionist says, 'If you bite it, write it.' Writing down everything that you put in your mouth really helps. I don’t count a damn calorie. But when I’m really trying to eat healthy, I write everything down. It really holds me accountable and puts me on a healthier path.
- Tyra Banks
Collection: Writing
Image of Rudyard Kipling
There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.
- Rudyard Kipling
Collection: Writing
Image of A. J. Liebling
Newspapers write about other newspapers with circumspection, ... about themselves with awe, and only after mature reflection.
- A. J. Liebling
Collection: Writing
Image of A. J. Liebling
Henry Miller may write about revelers self-woven into a human hooked rug, because his ecstasy is solemn.
- A. J. Liebling
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Lewis
I procrastinate to a point where I'm filled with self-loathing and then I start writing. It's usually a state of self-loathing that gets me going.
- Michael Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of Russell Baker
It takes great self-confidence to write a newspaper column. Some might say it takes arrogance. Be that as it may, my willingness to pronounce on a great many matters of which I have little or no knowledge is one of my prime qualifications for this trade.
- Russell Baker
Collection: Writing
Image of Jamaica Kincaid
The sound of words in a novel is a pretty amazing thing, and I am concerned with the sound of every word I write.
- Jamaica Kincaid
Collection: Writing
Image of Jamaica Kincaid
People think if you describe someone with glistening brown skin you're writing about race, as if the whole of the African diaspora is in someone's brown skin.
- Jamaica Kincaid
Collection: Writing
Image of Honore de Balzac
My writing table has seen all my wretchedness, knows all my plans, has overheard all my thoughts.
- Honore de Balzac
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
Ideally, anything one writes should have a social conscience: if you can write a story that thrills, and with a good message, that's the perfect type of a story.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
It's hard not to be enthusiastic when you like what you're doing and I love what I do. I love writing stories, I love coming up with ideas for new projects and I love the people I work with, because I work with great writers and artists and directors and actors.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
Jack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
I'm lucky. I don't have to produce the whole movie. What I've been doing is just coming up with ideas for movies. I write a concept, a treatment, an outline, and if I sell that to a studio, then someone else does the actual production and I go on to another project, although I keep the title executive producer.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of C. S. Lewis
You can make anything by writing.
- C. S. Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Remember that 'plumber in space' is not such a bad setup for a story.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Write as if your parents are dead.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Madeleine L'Engle
When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist; Shakespeare knew how to listen to his work, and so he often wrote better than he could write; Bach composed more deeply, more truly than he knew, Rembrandt's brush put more of the human spirit on canvas than Rembrandt could comprehend. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
- Madeleine L'Engle
Collection: Writing
Image of David Letterman
Today is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. President Lincoln wrote it on his way to the site of the speech on the back of an envelope. One guy on the back of an envelope wrote the great Gettysburg Address - while every night it takes six guys to write this crap!
- David Letterman
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Linklater
It's hard to see a film one time and really "get it," and write fully and intelligently about it. That's a review. That's not film criticism. And there's so many expectations involved, too. You're going in to see the latest Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, you really have high hopes, and you can't help but find that it's not exactly what you had in your head going in. Until you can watch it again, you can't accept the work for what it intends to be. It takes at least a second viewing.
- Richard Linklater
Collection: Writing
Image of Richard Linklater
…[Thomas Wolfe] says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.
- Richard Linklater
Collection: Writing
Image of James A. Baldwin
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can't explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you've had that experience, you see differently.
- James A. Baldwin
Collection: Writing
Image of James A. Baldwin
When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.
- James A. Baldwin
Collection: Writing
Image of Madeleine L'Engle
The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
- Madeleine L'Engle
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Must you write complete sentences each time, every time? Perish the thought. If your work consists only of fragments and floating clauses, the Grammar Police aren't going to come and take you away. Even William Strunk, that Mussolini of rhetoric, recognized the delicious pliability of language. "It is an old observation," he writes, "that the best writers sometimes disregard the rules of rhetoric." Yet he goes on to add this thought, which I urge you to consider: "Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules."
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing