Popular quotes about Writing! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 2
I havenโt had trouble with writerโs block. I think itโs because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichรฉd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesnโt have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writerโs block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.
Jennifer EganThe process of writing a book is infinitely more important than the book that is completed as a result of the writing, let alone the success or failure that book may have after it is written . . . the book is merely a symbol of the writing. In writing the book, I am living. I am growing. I am tapping myself. I am changing. The process is the product.
Theodore Isaac RubinI don't think you could teach someone to be a genius, but you can certainly teach them to not make rookie mistakes and to look at writing the way a writer looks at writing, and not just the way a reader looks at writing. There are a lot of techniques and skills that can be taught that will be helpful to anybody, no matter how gifted they are, and I think writing programs can be very good for people.
Michael ChabonReading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read.
Frank SmithThe text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Roland BarthesI realized you might make money at writing, and you might even make a living at it. So after that I didn't write stories just for the class but wrote them for the purpose of submitting them somewhere, and at some point in the process, I began writing them just to please myself and that's where you begin to see the real value of a life of writing.
Dean KoontzThere is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing.
Dorianne LauxSomebody told me I should try writing. Actually, a lot of people tried to get me to try writing, long before I thought I was 'the writing type'.
Karen WaltonI dunno when I started writing really. I was, like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex. 'occasionally' , stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls.
Tom WaitsThe whole thing of working in all these different mediums, it's just so that I can always be playing hooky from one of them. I can always be rebelling against my boss. Like, I'm supposed to be writing this book, but - heh heh heh - I'm writing a movie, secretly. I'm procrastinating, and in my off-hours I'm working on this movie that I'm not allowed to do, because I'm supposed to be writing a book!
Miranda JulyAt last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotionsโand your extraordinary and remarkable ideasโcan't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.
Doris LessingBe ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.
J. K. RowlingI love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great American writing is very limited. What we have is good, but it's limited. There's not enough engagement with the world. Our literature's not adventurous enough. The influence of MFA writing tends to make things repetitive. The idea that writing can be taught has changed the whole conversation in the U.S.
Rabih AlameddineCritics stopped being relevant when they stopped writing to inform and contextualize, and when they started writing to signal who they are, to display their identity by their stance on what they are writing about. Criticism should never be about the critic, but thats what it has become, and thatโs why no one cares about them anymore.
Tucker MaxWhen I'm doing interviews, I'm doing interviews, and when I am writing, I'm writing. I sit there with a musician and I write. It's the same process since I started writing in my twenties. I like to come in and leave with a finished song.
Lisa Marie PresleyYou can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.
Denis LearyMovies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.
Stephen KendrickI'm working on poems about work, I guess. Or related to work. Which sounds dull as drywall but I'm having great fun working the vernacular of work into poems. I'm also writing some poems about family. And I don't know, just writing. Taking breaks. Writing some more.
Randall MannSo the fact that there's someone who's planning what happens to the characters, writing it down, means that the characters always have a fate. And when we think about fate, we tend think of it as the thing we would have if we were literary characters, that is, if there were somebody out there, writing us.
Daniel KehlmannNever sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.
Laini TaylorIn college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn't actually doing any writing.
Anthony BourdainAt the time I was first writing the stories/essays that appear in Oedipus Wrecked, I was still under the impression that people would be delighted to see their name in print. I overlooked the fact that I was writing about intimate matters, and people are a bit touchy about airing their private lives in such a public fashion. Especially when it's done without their consent.
Kevin KeckTo me, writing is about how we see. The writers I want to read teach me how to see-see the world differently. In my writing there is no separation between how I observe the world and how I write the world. We write through our eyes. We write through our body. We write out of what we know.
Terry Tempest WilliamsWrite every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writingโand if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?
Rick BassI find dictating in the mass media particularly good because you're writing for voice anyway; you're writing for people to say a line and, consequently, saying a line through a machine is quite a valid test for the validity of what you're saying.
Rod SerlingNot writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.
Fran LebowitzLots of things are hard work, but I think writing, for me, after I started acting at 13 years old. I like writing now much more than I do acting only because well, partly because the scripts that are offered are junk.
Gene WilderI always felt better co-writing something - always co-writing. Because if I was the lead of it and it failed, then it failed on my own accord. I would say, "Well, I liked it or I screwed up. I take the hit on this one."
Bill HaderMy first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.
Judd ApatowWhen I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry. And the reason for that is because the fiction writers seemed to need to learn how to pay greater attention to language itself, to the way that language works.
Edward HirschWell, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.
Brian SelznickAmerican travel writing is very healthy. I'm always flicking through the reviews and I see plenty of travel writing - and an impressive line up and continual demand.
John GimletteI've always loved writing emotionally rich, character-driven novels that explore the way people fall in love and deal with life's triumphs and tragedies. I enjoy writing the contemporary and historical books equally, though perhaps 'enjoy' is the wrong word.
Susan WiggsI try to make the writing as regular and regimented as possible. I usually get up at around 5 a.m. and read what I wrote the day before. Some of the time, after I read, I think the writing's very good and some of the time I feel embarrassed by what I've written. You have to learn not to pay too much attention to these feelings.
Christopher Paul CurtisIt's just weird because like when I was writing Cry Baby I like...the only thing that I was thinking about, when writing it, was the concepts and the visuals, and the way that it sounded kind of happened naturally.
Melanie MartinezI'm really proud of the writing on Door to Door, and I think that's the Emmy that meant the most - the writing.
William H. MacySo writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary.
Ron PadgettIt strikes me that mathematical writing is similar to using a language. To be understood you have to follow some grammatical rules. However, in our case, nobody has taken the trouble of writing down the grammar; we get it as a baby does from parents, by imitation of others. Some mathematicians have a good ear; some not (and some prefer the slangy expressions such as 'iff'). That's life.
Jean-Pierre SerreWriting is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.
Margaret AtwoodI started writing songs in high school and always wanted to have a band, and eventually my creative endeavors developed into Theocracy. So in some ways, you could say the vision has been there since I started writing songs.
Matt SmithMy writing habits are pretty static. I get up every morning between 6 and 7 am, grab a cup of coffee, say a few prayers, and go downstairs to my office and start writing.
Mitch AlbomI think anyone who has had a fight and who's a very good observer of the situation and people's behavior is capable of writing a fight. But you do start thinking about writing during the fights that you have with your partner.
Julie DelpyThe idea that writing about characters of another race requires a passage through a critical gauntlet, which involves apology and self-examination of an almost punitive nature, as though the act of writing race was somehow morally suspect, is a dangerous one. This approach appears culturally sensitive, but often it reveals a failure of nerve. I believe the demand that we ought to reveals a species of fascism within the left - an embrace of political correctness with its required silences, which has left people afraid to offend or take a stand.
C.E. MorganI try to tell student writers to read as much as possible, not only literature but philosophy, theory, and to form obsessions. There's a big taboo in fiction creative writing workshops against using the self at all, and I think I try to encourage students to write the self, but to connect the self to something larger, which is to be this thinking, seeing, searching, eternally curious person, and that writing can come out of investigating and trying to understand confusion, and doubts, and obsessions.
Kate Zambreno