Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 240

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 240 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Jamaica Kincaid
In my writing, I'm often describing a universal situation. A situation in which human beings often choose to violate each other. Sometimes I happen to explore that in terms of the black/white dynamic. Generally, a white person does not like me to say, or does not like to be told, "You know, what you did was incredibly wrong."
- Jamaica Kincaid
Collection: Writing
Image of Jamaica Kincaid
The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.
- Jamaica Kincaid
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
I never really am concerned about the political landscape of the day when I'm writing because no matter what it is, it will change. By the time my stories come out, it will have changed. So I never think much about that.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Stan Lee
I have a reputation for doing superheroes, but I like all kinds of writing. In fact, hardly anybody knows this, but I've probably written as many humor stories as superhero stories.
- Stan Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Fran Lebowitz
The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.
- Fran Lebowitz
Collection: Writing
Image of John Krasinski
I am in that everything [ David Foster Wallace] writes is pretty much the best stuff I've read, so that makes me a fan I guess.
- John Krasinski
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Sinclair Lewis
Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
- Sinclair Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of Sinclair Lewis
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
- Sinclair Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of James A. Baldwin
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
- James A. Baldwin
Collection: Writing
Image of Jessa Crispin
I don't think you can write an experience as you're having it without being an idiot.
- Jessa Crispin
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Doris Lessing
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
- Doris Lessing
Collection: Writing
Image of Doris Lessing
You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.
- Doris Lessing
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Good writing is about telling the truth.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
The stuff I write about is pretty universal, the things my closest friends and I talk about - our anxiety about being here on this scary planet, during these scary times, as vulnerable as kittens, having lost so many people I couldn't live without.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Jon Krakauer
Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies.
- Jon Krakauer
Collection: Writing
Image of Florence King
I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty.
- Florence King
Collection: Writing
Image of Tommy Lee
I just write... if it's really good, it's going on the record. If it's average, it's going in the trash.
- Tommy Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Cass McCombs
I've always thought about myself as somewhat of a folk musician. I just write words.
- Cass McCombs
Collection: Writing
Image of Cass McCombs
I'm not trying to write for the masses. I don't care.
- Cass McCombs
Collection: Writing
Image of Cass McCombs
The writing of the record didn't take long, because I just have a huge stack of papers and I just pluck from the stack. It took a long time because it's very expensive to make records; in fact, I think it's a complete rip-off.
- Cass McCombs
Collection: Writing
Image of Lisa Kudrow
I just want to start writing, whether or not any of it is useable or marketable.
- Lisa Kudrow
Collection: Writing
Image of Dennis Lehane
It's very simple. If you learn how to write well, to write with depth, cream will rise to the top. You'll get published. But, there is no secret.
- Dennis Lehane
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Larkin
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
- Philip Larkin
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Larkin
I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
- Philip Larkin
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Larkin
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
- Philip Larkin
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Larkin
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any - after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
- Philip Larkin
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Larkin
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
- Philip Larkin
Collection: Writing
Image of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
The first condition of immortality is death.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Collection: Writing
Image of C. S. Lewis
Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
- C. S. Lewis
Collection: Writing
Image of Barbara Kingsolver
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
I'm very much aware in the writing of dialogue, or even in the narrative too, of a rhythm. There has to be a rhythm with it … Interviewers have said, you like jazz, don’t you? Because we can hear it in your writing. And I thought that was a compliment.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
After 58 years you'd think writing would get easier. It doesn't. If you're lucky, you become harder to please. That's all right, it's still a pleasure.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing