Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 242

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 242 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Madeleine L'Engle
If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.
- Madeleine L'Engle
Collection: Writing
Image of Karl Kraus
What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.
- Karl Kraus
Collection: Writing
Image of Karl Kraus
My readers think that I write for the day because my writings are based on the day. So I shall have to wait until my writings are obsolete. Then they may acquire timeliness.
- Karl Kraus
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of David Levithan
I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.
- David Levithan
Collection: Writing
Image of Nicole Krauss
That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
- Nicole Krauss
Collection: Writing
Image of Jennifer Lawrence
I just love film making; all aspects of it. I love the idea of writing but I just don't feel like I could really do it. I didn't even graduate from school.
- Jennifer Lawrence
Collection: Writing
Image of Chuck Klosterman
No woman will ever satisfy me. I know that now, and I would never try to deny it. But this is actually okay, because I will never satisfy a woman, either. Should I be writing such thoughts? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a bad idea. I can definitely foresee a scenario where that first paragraph could come back to haunt me, especially if I somehow became marginally famous.
- Chuck Klosterman
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
I write to find out what I think.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Dov Davidoff
Writing good jokes requires effort. Think I'll just start dressing funnier.
- Dov Davidoff
Collection: Writing
Image of Jon Spaihts
The science fiction I write comes from a pretty deep pool of literature, not just from the reflection of other science fiction films, and I think that gives me somewhat deeper roots.
- Jon Spaihts
Collection: Writing
Image of Jon Spaihts
I studied physics at Princeton when I was a college student, and my initial intention was to major in it but to also be a writer. What I discovered, because it was a very high-powered physics program with its own fusion reactor, was that to keep up with my fellow students in that program I would need to dedicate myself to math and physics all the time and let writing go. And I couldn't let writing go, so I let physics go and became a science fan and a storyteller.
- Jon Spaihts
Collection: Writing
Image of Franz Liszt
When you write the story of two happy lovers, let the story be set on the banks of Lake Como.
- Franz Liszt
Collection: Writing
Image of Fran Lebowitz
All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.
- Fran Lebowitz
Collection: Writing
Image of Fran Lebowitz
Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.
- Fran Lebowitz
Collection: Writing
Image of Fran Lebowitz
Screenwriting is not an artform, it is a punishment from God.
- Fran Lebowitz
Collection: Writing
Image of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
The exit is usually where the entrance was.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Collection: Writing
Image of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
It isn't easy to live after death. It takes a lifetime.
- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Collection: Writing
Image of Mario Vargas Llosa
I always write a draft version of the novel in which I try to develop, not the story, not the plot, but the possibilities of the plot. I write without thinking much, trying to overcome all kinds of self-criticism, without stopping, without giving any consideration to the style or structure of the novel, only putting down on paper everything that can be used as raw material, very crude material for later development in the story.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
Collection: Writing
Image of Mario Vargas Llosa
That is one thing I am sure of amid my many uncertainties regarding the literary vocation: deep inside, a writer feels that writing is the best thing that ever happened to him, or could ever happen to him, because as far as he is concerned, writing is the best possible way of life, never mind the social, political, or financial rewards of what he might achieve through it.
- Mario Vargas Llosa
Collection: Writing
Image of Mario Vargas Llosa
writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!
- Mario Vargas Llosa
Collection: Writing
Image of Vladimir Lenin
It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.
- Vladimir Lenin
Collection: Writing
Image of Stanley Kubrick
One man writes a novel. One man writes a symphony. It is essential that one man make a film.
- Stanley Kubrick
Collection: Writing
Image of Georg C. Lichtenberg
There is something in our minds like sunshine and the weather, which is not under our control. When I write, the best things come to me from I know not where.
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
Collection: Writing
Image of Kendrick Lamar
I started doing music when I was thirteen; I actually started writing my first rhymes.
- Kendrick Lamar
Collection: Writing
Image of John Leguizamo
I would be jokesmithing. I had files with tons of disses that I would try to write as I was on the train going to school.
- John Leguizamo
Collection: Writing
Image of Jerzy Kosinski
I suppress in my prose any language which calls attention to itself.
- Jerzy Kosinski
Collection: Writing
Image of Harper Lee
Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward.
- Harper Lee
Collection: Writing
Image of Nicholson Baker
Sometimes I'll spend an hour writing a tiny email. I work on it until I've created the illusion that I've dashed it off in three minutes. If I make a typo, I let it stand. Sometimes in fact I correct the typo without thinking, and then I back up and retype the typo so that it'll look more casual. I don't know why.
- Nicholson Baker
Collection: Writing
Image of Karl Kraus
A good writer does not receive anywhere near the number of poison-pen letters that is commonly assumed. Among a hundred jackassesthere are not ten who will admit to being jackasses, and at most one who will put it in writing.
- Karl Kraus
Collection: Writing
Image of Avril Lavigne
I don't know if people realize how much I tour and how much time I spend writing, but I really enjoy it.
- Avril Lavigne
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Lamott
You are going to have to give and give and give, or there's no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
- Anne Lamott
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
I don't want the reader to be aware of me as the writer.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Elmore Leonard
Never use an adverb to modify the verb 'said' . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange.
- Elmore Leonard
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen King
There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.
- Stephen King
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Leacock
To write well it is first necessary to have something to say.
- Stephen Leacock
Collection: Writing
Image of Steve Ballmer
Only our company and a handful of others are poised to write the future.
- Steve Ballmer
Collection: Writing
Image of Audre Lorde
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
- Audre Lorde
Collection: Writing
Image of Jack London
Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.
- Jack London
Collection: Writing
Image of Dave Barry
It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.
- Dave Barry
Collection: Writing