Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 69

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 69 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Rosita Forbes
The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.
- Rosita Forbes
Collection: Writing
Image of Charles Busch
I took many notes, more than usual before I sat down and wrote Act One, Scene One. I had perhaps eighty pages of notes. . . . I was so prepared that the script seemed inevitable. It was almost all there. I could almost collate it from my notes. The story line, the rather tenuous plot we have, seemed to work out itself. It was a very helpful way to write, and it wasn't so scary. I wasn't starting with a completely blank page.
- Charles Busch
Collection: Writing
Image of Syd Field
Writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain. When you’re climbing, all you can see is the rock in front of you and the rock directly above you. You can’t see where you’ve come from or where you’re going.
- Syd Field
Collection: Writing
Image of Cliff Martinez
Singer/songwriters spend two or three years making an album, and then it goes up for sale and everybody pirates it and you don't make any money. Whereas, writing a film score you still get presented with a paycheck.
- Cliff Martinez
Collection: Writing
Image of Cliff Martinez
I don't like to write any music to a script. Experience has taught me that's generally a waste of time.
- Cliff Martinez
Collection: Writing
Image of John Gardner
A common and usually unfortunate answer is “Write about what you know.” Nothing can be more limiting to the imagination, nothing is quicker to turn on the psyche's censoring devices and distortion systems, than trying to write truthfully.
- John Gardner
Collection: Writing
Image of John Gardner
People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.
- John Gardner
Collection: Writing
Image of Ellen McLaughlin
I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.
- Ellen McLaughlin
Collection: Writing
Image of James Gandolfini
The Sopranos all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good.
- James Gandolfini
Collection: Writing
Image of Andy Garcia
Great writing attracts great actors. It attracts money. Without a great script, you have nothing.
- Andy Garcia
Collection: Writing
Image of Carol Emshwiller
I always had plenty of ideas. I didn’t exactly have them. They grew—little by little, a half an idea at a time. First, part of a phrase and then a person to go with it. After a person, then a little corner of a place for the person to be in.
- Carol Emshwiller
Collection: Writing
Image of Anthony de Jasay
Karl Popper once advised a student that if he wanted to reap intellectual fame, he should write endless pages of obscure, high-flown prose that would leave the reader puzzled and cowed. He should then here and there smuggle in a few sensible, straightforward sentences all could understand. The reader would feel that since he has grasped this part, he must have also grasped the rest. He would then congratulate himself and praise the author.
- Anthony de Jasay
Collection: Writing
Image of Alice Weaver Flaherty
How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that...we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.
- Alice Weaver Flaherty
Collection: Writing
Image of Alice Weaver Flaherty
What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.
- Alice Weaver Flaherty
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Greenblatt
The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.
- Stephen Greenblatt
Collection: Writing
Image of Stephen Greenblatt
Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig
- Stephen Greenblatt
Collection: Writing
Image of Jason Marsden
I want to direct, write, produce... y'know, I love the entertainment industry
- Jason Marsden
Collection: Writing
Image of Rita Moreno
Ultimately, a city is formed by its people and the women in Berkeley are just great. They are opinionated, they have ideas, they belong to boards, and they write letters to editors... really wonderful people.
- Rita Moreno
Collection: Writing
Image of Sarah Manguso
Those who claim to write about something larger and more significant than the self sometimes fail to comprehend the dimensions of self.
- Sarah Manguso
Collection: Writing
Image of Sarah Manguso
The only thing I've consistently been interested in in the last twenty-five years is writing very short texts. That continues to interest me as a project, to contain some part of reality, which is chaotic by definition, in a contained space. I like small apartments. I like getting rid of stuff. I went through my files yesterday and spent hours shredding things. It was great.
- Sarah Manguso
Collection: Writing
Image of Sarah Manguso
I see no reason not to write whatever comes to me.
- Sarah Manguso
Collection: Writing
Image of Sarah Manguso
If I'm not writing a thing, depression might be looming.
- Sarah Manguso
Collection: Writing
Image of Kathleen Madigan
I don't really write jokes. I wait for stuff to happen in life, and then I tell it on stage.
- Kathleen Madigan
Collection: Writing
Image of Kathleen Madigan
Some people are mean, and when you look at their page, they only write mean things, but I have a great time with a twitter person. It's not even to promote myself, just to entertain me.
- Kathleen Madigan
Collection: Writing
Image of Steve Diggle
When you're writing you're affected by everything that's going on around you.
- Steve Diggle
Collection: Writing
Image of Alexandra Fuller
What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.
- Alexandra Fuller
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
I'm a little skeptical of so-called narco fiction, I have to say, though some writers I admire may have written some narco fiction. You feel the dread and the atmosphere in Yuri Herrera's extraordinary novels, but you'd never say that what he writes is narco fiction. The same goes for Martin Solares's novels, inspired by the nightmare city of Tampico, where he's from. Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, I know that they're deeply affected by what goes on in Mexico, but their wonderful writing points in another direction, though not necessarily always and only.
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
I think everything you are, everything that engages you, eventually comes to bear on the novel you write. I think the creative energy in novel writing, obviously, comes from tension. From trying to fuse. From trying to make coherent disparate things that might not at all seem to belong together within a narrative.
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
I'm not against anything that anybody might want to try to pull off in fiction. Fiction writing has to, at least, always represent a possibility of absolute freedom.
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
I'm not a Mexican writer, but I think everything that happens in Mexico affects the Mexican writers I know, in their sense of being human and of being Mexican, even if they don't in any explicit way address these issues in their writing.
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Francisco Goldman
I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!
- Francisco Goldman
Collection: Writing
Image of Mikhail Gorbachev
History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.
- Mikhail Gorbachev
Collection: Writing
Image of Kathy Sierra
The best user experiences are enchanting. They help the user enter an alternate reality, whether it's the world of making music, writing, sharing photos, coding, or managing a project.
- Kathy Sierra
Collection: Writing
Image of Skylar Grey
I write a lot about the past because I really see things clearly in hindsight.
- Skylar Grey
Collection: Writing
Image of Mick Hucknall
There are too many people writing about whether they just farted or not.
- Mick Hucknall
Collection: Writing
Image of Eric Whitacre
Write the music your inside-you needs your outside-you to hear.
- Eric Whitacre
Collection: Writing
Image of Ba Jin
I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.
- Ba Jin
Collection: Writing
Image of David Biespiel
I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.
- David Biespiel
Collection: Writing
Image of David Biespiel
Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.
- David Biespiel
Collection: Writing
Image of David Biespiel
For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.
- David Biespiel
Collection: Writing
Image of David Biespiel
There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.
- David Biespiel
Collection: Writing
Image of John Ashbery
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry.
- John Ashbery
Collection: Writing
Image of Barney Frank
The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.
- Barney Frank
Collection: Writing
Image of Iliza Shlesinger
I don't come up with ideas, they come to me. I write them down and try to convey what's wrong with me to the audience as best I can.
- Iliza Shlesinger
Collection: Writing
Image of Lidia Yuknavitch
I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.
- Lidia Yuknavitch
Collection: Writing
Image of Lidia Yuknavitch
These words "accessible" and "emotionally available" get thrown at us from agents and editors and publishers - or the reverse - if it's not all goo-ey and sentimental we're told it's "cold" or "uncaring" or "emotionally vacant." In other words, responses to women's writing in particular continue to be "gendered."
- Lidia Yuknavitch
Collection: Writing
Image of C. B. Cebulski
To the folks asking how they can become a comics writer if Marvel doesn't accept submissions... YOU WRITE COMICS!!
- C. B. Cebulski
Collection: Writing
Image of Tarryn Fisher
That's why writers write—to say things loudly with ink. To give feet to thoughts; to make quiet, still feelings loudly heard.
- Tarryn Fisher
Collection: Writing