Writing quotes

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

When I'm writing about reality, I'm writing about death. When I'm writing fiction, I'm writing about life.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

I'm honestly as happy writing Superman Adventures as I am writing Wanted.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.

When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar.

My writing improved the more I wrote - and the more I read good writing, from Shakespeare on down.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

I get drunk writing words. I don't drink or do drugs, but I get so carried away with writing that I get inebriated from it.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

The real danger of writing a great song when you're on something is that it might get you thinking that the only way to repeat that is by only writing when you're high.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

I'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

I've been with Life now for seventeen years and I have written several articles for them and will be doing more writing and do at least two assignments a year besides my writing.

I cling to the fantasy that I could have done something more creative. Like actually writing a script, or writing a book. But the awful truth is that I... probably can't!

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

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.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.

Actually, that's one of the things I was thinking about writing a story about me, loosely based or autobiographical. I just don't want to be like some people that are in their twenties and writing autobiographies.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

I don't see one as bring better or more literate than the other and there's a real buzz to not only writing about a character I love like Superman, but also writing something that kids can enjoy.

I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

First of all, writing at best - certainly fiction writing - more and more I think is magic.