Top 1200 Great Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

The best kind of writing, and the biggest thrill in writing, is to suddenly read a line from your typewriter that you didnt know was in you.

Writing is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.

'Liberace's a great film. It's a great piece of material. I have a great script and it's a great score.

My father always told me I should be a writer, and I found I loved writing my autobiography; writing is such an interesting process.

When the target audience is American teenage kids, you can have problems. My generation prized really fine acting and writing. Sometimes you have to go back to the basic principles which underpin great visual comedy.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

You start by writing to live. You end by writing so as not to die.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

My mother and I will continue on some level that I havent determined yet. I think my mothers a great character, and I have to say that giving my mother to the world has to be the biggest thrill of my writing career.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

People don't stress enough that when they're writing lyrics, they are writing.

Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Writing a whole series was a crash course in screenwriting, which is a very different muscle to standup comedy writing.

The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

Once I get my writing done, then I can turn my attention elsewhere - and not the other way around. The writing has to be the foundation.

I knew when I was writing The Angel's Game that a lot of people would be upset that I didn't write Shadow Of The Wind 2. That's okay, that's part of the game. You do what you have to do. If they like it, great. If they don't, too bad. What are you going to do?

I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

I suppose I often think of my writing as quite impersonal. But it turned out, when my father died, writing was exactly what I wanted to do.

Since I didn't spend a great amount of time on writing the lyrics, some people would argue that they're too vague or simplistic, but I think it's kind of good. I wouldn't say they're all stream of consciousness, but they're not necessarily overwrought.

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

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.

I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.

My only close-to-game-plan is to follow good writing. If the writing is in TV or if it's in theater or in film, that's it. It doesn't really matter what the medium is.

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.

I chose law because writing was involved. I didn't realize how boring legal writing was, but I even learned to love that.

In my writing classes, I don't outlaw any genre writing.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Through all this other stuff I was doing, I always went back to the writing, and it was writing that made me feel whole, complete.

Who is writing these screenwriting books? Not actually writing for the studios in Hollywood. These are people that have one or a half of a credit on maybe one movie, or none. So they're all theoretical.

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.

I started writing when I was around 6. I say 'writing,' but it was really just making up stuff! I started writing and doing my own thing. I didn't really know what a demo was or anything like that, so I started getting interested in studio gear and started learning about one instrument at a time. My first instrument was an accordion.

There are more and more women writing. And there are more and more good male writers who are writing and who learned and decided it's worth writing for women.

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

I would rather not write if I'm depressed, or am going through a breakup, or I've had some disappointment, or I'm having a family issue. You don't want to just put out an open wound. Sometimes that just isn't even really good writing. Good writing should be good writing and storytelling and not just therapy or someone's personal journal.

I never made any plan before writing, however I succeeded. I enjoyed writing with excitement ,"what happen on the next page?"

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

It is with great disappointment and regret that after having the privilege of writing and performing the music of The Black Crowes over the last 24 years, I find myself in the position of saying that the band has broken up.

My job is to work at song writing and singing and telling the truth in song writing. My job is to be courageous enough to go on stage and tell the truth, the same truth that's gone into my song writing.

I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.

A great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will grow a great church.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I loved 'Everybody Loves Raymond' because I like Ray and I thought it was beautifully cast, I thought it was great writing. I thought Patricia Heaton was wonderful.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

Do not beat up on yourself. Do not criticize your writing as lousy, inadequate, stupid, or any of the evil epithets that you are used to heaping on yourself. Such self-bashing is never useful. If you indulge in it, your writing doesn't stand a chance. So when your mind turns on you, turn it back, stamp it down, shut it up, and keep writing.

For me, writing is something that I need to do. If I'm not writing, I'm not happy.

When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.

I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love.

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

Haec ego non multis (scribo), sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus. I am writing this not to many, but to you: certainly we are a great enough audience for each other.

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul's death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.

They ask me what I'm writing for - I'm writing to show you what we're fighting for.