Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 8

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 8 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Giovanni Ribisi
If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.
- Giovanni Ribisi
Collection: Writing
Image of Bernard Berenson
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
- Bernard Berenson
Collection: Writing
Image of Ann Patchett
People always say, "Can writing be taught?" I always think, I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to do dialogue, how to do character, but I can't teach you how to be a decent person, and I can't teach you how to have something to say.
- Ann Patchett
Collection: Writing
Image of Jayne Ann Krentz
I read what I like to write: romantic suspense. I also love thrillers and novels of suspense, but I can't handle extreme violence and torture.
- Jayne Ann Krentz
Collection: Writing
Image of John Zorn
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way
- John Zorn
Collection: Writing
Image of John Zorn
I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive. You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself.
- John Zorn
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Sometimes I think it is ... frustration with life as it is lived day to day that compels me to write such long letters to people who seldom reply in kind, if indeed they reply at all. Somehow by compressing and editing the events of my life, I infuse them with a dramatic intensity totally lacking at the time, but oddly enough I find that years later what I remember is not the event as I lived it but as I described it in a letter.
- Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
Collection: Writing
Image of Edmund White
Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.
- Edmund White
Collection: Writing
Image of Edmund White
Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else and they never say anything directly.
- Edmund White
Collection: Writing
Image of Henry Jenkins
Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves
- Henry Jenkins
Collection: Writing
Image of Stendhal
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
- Stendhal
Collection: Writing
Image of Danny Strong
Usually if a scene's really hard to write, I just don't write it. Nothing's coming to mind.
- Danny Strong
Collection: Writing
Image of Tobias Smollett
Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.
- Tobias Smollett
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Braverman
Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.
- Kate Braverman
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Braverman
writing is about doing something very close to the bone. It's about shocking yourself. When I write, I like to make myself cry, laugh - I like to give myself an experience. I see a lot of writing out there that's very safe. But if you're not scaring yourself, why would you think that you'd be scaring anybody else? If you're not coming to a revelation about your place in the universe, why would you think anyone else would?
- Kate Braverman
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Braverman
Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.
- Kate Braverman
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Braverman
I write a lot by sound. One sound leads me to another. These sounds aren't random; they have their own logic.
- Kate Braverman
Collection: Writing
Image of Kate Braverman
All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.
- Kate Braverman
Collection: Writing
Image of Jane Hirshfield
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
- Jane Hirshfield
Collection: Writing
Image of Cardinal Richelieu
Never write a letter and never destroy one.
- Cardinal Richelieu
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Waits
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
- Tom Waits
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Ondaatje
I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.
- Michael Ondaatje
Collection: Writing
Image of Salman Rushdie
Until you know who you are you can’t write.
- Salman Rushdie
Collection: Writing
Image of Justine Larbalestier
I started writing a novel from the monster's point of view. It has its own difficulties but, I'm ashamed to say, it's much easier writing from a psychopath's point of view than from that of their empathetic opposite.
- Justine Larbalestier
Collection: Writing
Image of Justine Larbalestier
I'm almost back to being able to write as much as six hours a day .
- Justine Larbalestier
Collection: Writing
Image of Terry Riley
The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they’ve developed together as a group.
- Terry Riley
Collection: Writing
Image of Ralph Keyes
Anxiety is not only an inevitable part of the writing process but a necessary part. If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.
- Ralph Keyes
Collection: Writing
Image of Ralph Keyes
Be as creative in your tactics as you are in your writing. Find what gets your engine going, no matter how peculiar it may seem to others.
- Ralph Keyes
Collection: Writing
Image of Ralph Keyes
I think that simply nudging yourself into unfamiliar settings - physical or emotional - can produce surprising results on the writing front.
- Ralph Keyes
Collection: Writing
Image of Ralph Keyes
I'm tempted to say that the top three reasons for hopelessness are rejection, rejection, rejection. But let's cast our net wider. 1) Not being able to write as well as we hoped we could. 2) Not being able to write at all. 3) Rejection.
- Ralph Keyes
Collection: Writing
Image of Ralph Keyes
Willa Cather said that she write best when she stopped trying to write and began simply to remember.
- Ralph Keyes
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Stoppard
I write fiction because it's a way of making statements I can disown.
- Tom Stoppard
Collection: Writing
Image of Rainn Wilson
You have total control of it, and when you're an actor, you're subject to production design and costumes and directors and studio choices and producer choices, but when you're writing it, you're creating your own little world in your head, peopled with your little characters. No one is in there monkeying with it, at least not at first - though they will. With this and the other projects I'm working on, it'll have to be given away, and it'll have to be someone else's property.
- Rainn Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Flann O'Brien
Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
- Flann O'Brien
Collection: Writing
Image of Jules Renard
Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.
- Jules Renard
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Stuart
If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.
- Anne Stuart
Collection: Writing
Image of Daniil Kharms
One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.
- Daniil Kharms
Collection: Writing
Image of Pliny the Elder
True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.
- Pliny the Elder
Collection: Writing
Image of Paul Westerberg
I used to write things that might have sounded better coming out of an older person's voice or vision. Hence, "grandpa-boy." I'm an old man, but I'm a boy. A really old boy!
- Paul Westerberg
Collection: Writing
Image of Nora Raleigh Baskin
When I write, I can be heard. And known. But nobody has to look at me. Nobody has to see me at all.
- Nora Raleigh Baskin
Collection: Writing
Image of Ron Rash
I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.
- Ron Rash
Collection: Writing
Image of Ron Rash
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.
- Ron Rash
Collection: Writing
Image of Joanna Russ
Science fiction, as I mentioned before, writes about what is neither impossible nor possible; the fact is that, when the question of possibility comes up in science fiction, the author can only reply that nobody knows. We haven't been there yet. We haven't discovered that yet. Science fiction hasn't happened.
- Joanna Russ
Collection: Writing
Image of Joanna Russ
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
- Joanna Russ
Collection: Writing
Image of Isobelle Carmody
Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.
- Isobelle Carmody
Collection: Writing
Image of Isobelle Carmody
Short stories do not say this happened and this happened and this happened. They are a microcosm and a magnification rather than a linear progression.
- Isobelle Carmody
Collection: Writing
Image of Dave Mustaine
I want to write something that makes it easy for young people to look right into the abyss.
- Dave Mustaine
Collection: Writing