Top 1200 Personal Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

I didn't take writing seriously at first - I didn't think I could do it. When I did, I fell in love with it. But writing is very lonely.

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

We shall probably get nearest to the truth if we think of the conscious and personal psyche as resting upon the broad basis of an inherited and universal psychic disposition which is as such unconscious, and that our personal psyche bears the same relation to the collective psyche as the individual to society.

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

Music's always part of my writing. I think all art is interconnected. You can't create or experience one without its influences bleeding into another. In my writing, music's mostly something that feeds my inspiration and mood while I'm writing, but it's also taught me how to score scenes and even novels. The rise and fall of the storyline echoes the flow of a good piece of music.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

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.

I've never been much for self-revelation. In two decades of public life, I always approached the limelight with extreme caution. Not that I kept my personal life off-limits; rather, the personal life I put on display was a blend of fact and fiction.

What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing. My major sense organ is apparently a pencil.

Being a writer involves writing. You've got to commit to sitting down and writing instead of Xbox or Netflix.

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered.

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

I've found it really hard to finish writing songs when you're writing on not just your schedule but somebody else's.

I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

If you think about writing a book, or when I did, it seems daunting, but when I began writing, it just started flowing.

When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all.

The main thing about writing is... writing. Sitting your butt down in the chair and doing the work.

It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.

For all forms, writing dialogue is almost like writing music. I pay close attention to rhythms and tones.

There's more than enough in the world I am currently writing about to last for several lifetimes of writing.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I sometimes don't know what I'm writing when I start writing it, on some level.

Never mistake talking about writing for actual writing.

writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all

There is a difference between writing and being an author. Authors talk. I'm standing here talking now. This has nothing to do with writing.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.

I don't think writing open-ended lyrics is necessarily an important part of writing good pop songs.

Personal convictions are not politics. Personal convictions, if they become the subject of a group conviction, they become a cult.

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.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

I don't do much of anything consciously in writing - in poetry writing, anyway, prose usually being a different matter, of course.

I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative.

I'm more interested in the writing than in the content per se (good writing can be about wallpaper and I'll devour it).

I have been writing songs since I was 9 years old, so writing has and always will be my first love and passion.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.

My feeling is that writing Fantasy should be harder - not easier - than writing any other kind of fiction.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

Radical transparency has an enormous impact on our personal lives. We can no longer share thoughts, quips, photos or personal opinions anywhere on the web without being mindful that they may turn up where we least expect it (notably job interviews, divorce proceedings or public media).

I've always been a fan of plain writing. I hate metaphor-laden, heavily larded, lyrical writing.

I try to sort of make myself emotional in the moment when I'm writing, and that always translates better. When I'm writing, I can't do abstract.

Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change.

I think I came to film-making through writing. I started to write, and people, teachers, responded to my writing.

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

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

Your own personal health is your own personal choice, all the way down the line.

It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.

I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.

My personal life is a source of incredible happiness for me, but it's personal and it's not for me to hock, or shop around to the highest bidder. Plus, it could never live up to the amazing mythology that everyone online has created for me, so I'll keep mum about it.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.

Fantasy is my genre and my home in the writing world. I consider it the biggest writing room in all literature, where there are literally no boundaries at all.