A Quote by Hugh Leonard

I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else.

Hugh Leonard

Quote Topics

Able Anything Anything Else Else Write Writer

Quote Author

Hugh Leonard
Irish - Dramatist
November 9, 1926 - February 12, 2009

What I've become convinced makes a writer are the days you hate it, the days you'd rather stick those pencils in your eyes. Sometimes I almost punish myself - if I'm not going be able to write, I'm not going be able to do anything else. I just sit there and wait.

Ron Rash

If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.

Thomas Merton

I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.

Henry Miller

I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

William Saroyan

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.

Alice Munro

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

Jamaica Kincaid

Every writer should be able to write anything if you do the research and you're sensitive enough to ask the questions.

Courtney A. Kemp

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else

Sarah McLachlan

I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else.

Sarah McLachlan

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

Michael Redhill

I believe writers should be able to write about anything - anything - but there is also a sense in which your lived experience shapes what you write and what you don't write.

Katie Kitamura

Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.

Karen Bender

The writer who is literally an addict, the writer who can't help himself, the writer who HAS to write, can never be anything but an amateur, because the industry requires the professional to put writing on hold not just for a day or two, or a week, but for years.

Helen DeWitt

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

Wayne Grady

There's this message to comedians in particular, that you shouldn't write it, and a television writer should write it. And that's a prevailing conventional wisdom that I think is really wrong. That's not to say that television writers aren't great, but I think that the belief that some comedy writer's going to be able to capture your voice is naive.