Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 37

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 37 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Doug Peacock
You find yourself by losing yourself. By not thinking about yourself all of the time. When I am in a slump with my writing, I'll go and walk for a week. Walk and not see a human being. Something happens after four or five days which is quite wonderful. It is an ancient thing. Your sense of smell. Your hearing. They come back.
- Doug Peacock
Collection: Writing
Image of Paul Schrader
I don't think it's very useful to open wide the door for young artists; the ones who break down the door are more interesting.
- Paul Schrader
Collection: Writing
Image of Allison Mackie
Writing without words? Its not easy, I tell you! I stab the pen into my heart and let the blood flow. No more ink, no more words, no more b.s. Just me.
- Allison Mackie
Collection: Writing
Image of Louise Doughty
Writing gets easier once you know your allies and banish your enemies.
- Louise Doughty
Collection: Writing
Image of Sjon
I have to face questions like, "Do I simply write the best text I possibly can? Do I specifically engage with contemporary issues? 'Do I consciously try to write something that is timeless?"
- Sjon
Collection: Writing
Image of Sjon
I'm not one of those writers who writes everyday.
- Sjon
Collection: Writing
Image of Sjon
I usually leave Reykavik for two to three weeks to go to the South Coast of Iceland where I have a small fisherman's hut from the beginning of the last century. That's where I sit down and do the actual writing. I might write for 16 hours a day or something. That's how it happens.
- Sjon
Collection: Writing
Image of Arthur Quiller-Couch
Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
- Arthur Quiller-Couch
Collection: Writing
Image of Pedro Almodovar
When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.
- Pedro Almodovar
Collection: Writing
Image of Caroline Gordon
As a rule, one must write a great many words before one learns to write well.
- Caroline Gordon
Collection: Writing
Image of Bonnie Baker
Solitude. It is way underrated in our world of writing. We stay busy. We act busy. We thrive on busy. The truth is there is a lot of beauty that lives in the solitude. Quiet is not the enemy. Quiet is necessary for brains to not self-destruct.
- Bonnie Baker
Collection: Writing
Image of Max Reger
I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it shall be behind me.
- Max Reger
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Ambrose
There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
- Stephen Ambrose
Collection: Writing
Image of Rivers Cuomo
I can't say I was consciously thinking of the big changes in the music business when I was writing the lyrics, but change, uncertainty, flux, impermanence - these are things I'm acutely aware of. And I enjoy facing it all.
- Rivers Cuomo
Collection: Writing
Image of Harry Crews
Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.
- Harry Crews
Collection: Writing
Image of Harry Crews
We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Becauwse we really don't lov what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems - if you really loved it - you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not. ... Our present education is rotten because it teaches us to love Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people.
- Harry Crews
Collection: Writing
Image of Patricia MacLachlan
I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.
- Patricia MacLachlan
Collection: Writing
Image of Will Shetterly
There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.
- Will Shetterly
Collection: Writing
Image of Will Shetterly
The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.
- Will Shetterly
Collection: Writing
Image of Jeremy Larner
If you're a writer, you want to get your soul out there, where people can look at it.
- Jeremy Larner
Collection: Writing
Image of Kwame Dawes
Racist writing is a craft failure.
- Kwame Dawes
Collection: Writing
Image of Ashly Lorenzana
It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.
- Ashly Lorenzana
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Beachy-Quick
Poetry challenges you. Much of its importance is that it's one of the few places left in culture that makes things difficult-it asks you to think, to perceive and not to take for granted what we think about the world.
- Dan Beachy-Quick
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Beachy-Quick
Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another's ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear's labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve's realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world's image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see-thoughtfully.
- Dan Beachy-Quick
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Beachy-Quick
The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
- Dan Beachy-Quick
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Beachy-Quick
[The publication of his first poem] was wonderful ... but it taught me early on that the only thing that really matters is writing the next poem. Publication is best seen as a happy accident.
- Dan Beachy-Quick
Collection: Writing
Image of Colin Dexter
I think that you've got to be prepared to write a load of nonsense to start with and then you can tart it up. The business of getting going, getting started, is enormously important, and this can be physical. Solvitur Ambulando as the Romans used to say, which means the solution comes through walking.
- Colin Dexter
Collection: Writing
Image of Harry Redknapp
I write like a two-year-old and I can't spell.
- Harry Redknapp
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Creeley
Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.
- Robert Creeley
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Creeley
I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.
- Robert Creeley
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Creeley
Hopefully, I write what I don't know.
- Robert Creeley
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Kim
It is normal for me to wake and find myself writing in the dark... or to be out of my tomb, caught in an unearthly world, alive with the images that haunt me.
- Elizabeth Kim
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Kim
When I write I simply follow my heart. And my flights of fantasy. It is not done with a conscious effort. I'm continually inspired and write reflexively.
- Elizabeth Kim
Collection: Writing
Image of Alice McDermott
The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
- Alice McDermott
Collection: Writing
Image of Alice McDermott
When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
- Alice McDermott
Collection: Writing
Image of Sol Saks
The worst thing you write is better than the best thing you didn't write.
- Sol Saks
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Cormier
As much as there is joy in writing, there's always the little bit of terror to keep you on edge, on your toes. It is a strange way to occupy yourself - to enjoy your life on a daily basis. There is no guarantee that something great is going to come next.
- Robert Cormier
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Cormier
I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.
- Robert Cormier
Collection: Writing
Image of Bonnie Friedman
Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.
- Bonnie Friedman
Collection: Writing
Image of Bonnie Friedman
our finest writing will certainly come from what is unregenerate in ourselves. It will come from the part that is obdurate, unbanishable, immune to education, springing up like grass.
- Bonnie Friedman
Collection: Writing
Image of Bonnie Friedman
Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.
- Bonnie Friedman
Collection: Writing
Image of Geoffrey Nunberg
The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.
- Geoffrey Nunberg
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucy Corin
For a really long time [before writing the novel], I was watching a lot of serial killer movies and I started to wonder if this was a trend and if other people were doing the same thing. That's what happens when you suddenly have a critical perspective on your own behavior.
- Lucy Corin
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucy Corin
I don't want to write the thing that I am a consumer of when I'm unconscious. I want to write the thing that makes me contend with the thing that I've been consuming unconsciously.
- Lucy Corin
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucy Corin
When you're spending that much time by yourself in your car looking at landscapes, it's desolate. Most of the other people around you are invisible in their own cars. You're driving past houses where maybe once in a while somebody is out, but that's about it. So I was interested in that aesthetic and I decided I wanted to write an apocalyptic narrative, but the more I thought of it, it seemed bizarre and untenable to me to pick one, so I just didn't.
- Lucy Corin
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucy Corin
I didn't learn how to read and write until pretty late, and it was this very mysterious, incredible thing, like driving, that I didn't get to do. And then I started writing things down on little scraps of paper and I would hide them. I would write the year on them and then I would stuff them in a drawer somewhere. But I didn't start to really read until about eight. I'm dyslexic, so it took a long time.
- Lucy Corin
Collection: Writing
Image of Lucy Corin
You know how some people will say to writers, "Why don't you just write a romance novel that sells a bunch of copies and then you'll have the money to do the kind of writing you want to do"? I always say that I don't have the skills or knowledge to do that. It would be just as hard for me to do that kind of writing as it would be to learn how to do any number of productive careers that I can't manage to make myself do.
- Lucy Corin
Collection: Writing
Image of Jimmy Webb
Songwriting is Hell on Earth. If it isn't, then you're doing it wrong.
- Jimmy Webb
Collection: Writing
Image of Jimmy Webb
Even if chords are simple, they should rub. They should have dissonances in them. I've always used a lot of alternate bass lines, suspensions, widely spaced voicings. Dfferent textures to get very warm chords. Sometimes you're setting up strange chords by placing a chord in front of it that's going to set it off like a diamond in a gold band. It's not just finding interesting chords, it's how you sequence them, like stringing together pearls on a string. ... Interesting chords will compel interesting melodies. It's very hard to write a boring melody to an interesting chord sequence.
- Jimmy Webb
Collection: Writing