Writing Quotes

Before the house-maid had lit the fire the next day, or the sun gained any power over the cold, gloo...

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I...

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character...

1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, i...

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the ...

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves...

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventuall...

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of...

What does it mean to not be alone? I've approached that question through music, technology, writing ...

The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.

Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a...

For a few weeks you got up at six to compose short stories at the kitchen table with while Amanda sl...

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Veri...

You have always wanted to be a writer. Getting the job at the magazine was only your first step towa...

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another li...

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I...

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented t...

The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a sin...

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

I could not think without writing.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.

The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose n...

The most clear-sided view of the darkest possible situation is itself an act of optimism

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

Couldn't I try...Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune...But couldn't I in another medium?....

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're he...

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the ...

I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of ...

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the s...

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wonde...

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jea...

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes yo...

When I was 18, I took a trip to Thailand with a friend. We stayed for a month. Bangkok was very raw ...

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection ...

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount t...

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words...

And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with a...

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. W...

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at ...

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not sh...

…you either do or do not have a comedy mind, whatever that is, maybe a heightened sense of the ridic...

I am driven. Being driven is my energy source. It is my fun.…I believe that where there is action, t...

I had a blind date with a dentist — and he told me to come back in six months.

The revelation that personal truth can be the foundation of comedy, that outrageousness can be clean...

The act of creation fascinates me. You can only sit with blank page and wait. You cannot press a but...

When you begin to losing your audience, do not get loud; get quiet, make them find you and come back...

Laughing made me feel safe. I was not going to be enveloped by the seediness that coated this world ...

Maybe that is why in my comedy I try and puncture the hypocrisy all around us, why it is almost a cr...

It gathers emotionally inside you, in a strange way a by-product of struggle, of a willingness to do...

Liked" was the kiss of death. "Loved" or "hated" interested him. At least the performer had aroused ...

Somehow, some way, every person in the arts has to find an accommodation with disappointment and emb...

I said, "Is there!" I told him there is a Mafia school where they teach them math — if Johnny has te...

…but I think comedy is more aggressive than that. It is a medium for revenge. We can deflate and pun...

People say it is not the key to happiness, but I have always figured if you have enough money you ca...

Everything comes out of smoke and mist and nothingness, a mystical happening…

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the ...

I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about wo...

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me fr...

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to a...

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like d...

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the...

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.

When you've got a thing to say, Say it! Don't take half a day.When your tale's got little in itCrowd...

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such ...

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege ...

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise ...

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do t...

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

Find the problem, find the story.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer ...

It must take a lot of self-discipline,' she said.'Oh, I don't know. I don't have much.' He felt hims...

Do you write every day?' 'Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don't work very hard, really. Really I'm on v...

I write to make sense of my life."-John Cheever, quoted in _Cheever - A Life_ (2009) by Blake Bailey

Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around u...

If a man means his writing seriously he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he...

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, ...

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands ...

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: Th...

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting th...

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Ve...

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the ...

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the w...