Top 1200 Personal Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

Retiring from writing is to avoid the inevitable bitterness which a writing career is bound to deliver as its end product in almost every case.

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.

When I am writing, I focus one hundred percent on my writing. Then, by the time I'm half way through the book, I'm already thinking about the ending.

Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.

Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved.

I love Chanel. Everything about her was personal. All of those lions she made, she handmade them. Red and green, they were her favorite colors. She kept it personal and real, and she was a woman.

Writing is 90% procrastination. It is a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

I'd be a dope to compare my writing with Wallace Stegner's, but that book probably influenced me in ways I didn't even realize while I was writing The Night Journal.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

Writing isn't something I do, writing is something that I am. I am writing - it's just an expression of me.

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

Style is really very personal. It's kind of timeless. Style is really about how you put yourself together. It's something very personal.

The person is only a phenomenon, the principle is behind it. Thus from both sides, simultaneously, we find the breaking down of personalities and the approach towards principles, the Personal God approaching the Impersonal, the personal man approaching the Impersonal Man.

Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require time and money. But I say this honestly and somewhat harshly – if you’re not willing to prioritize your writing, perhaps you should do something else?

Writing is writing. It is all about telling stories, and I've been doing that for so long, in all realms, that it all feels like the same thing to me anyway.

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.

I feel like you become a songwriter when you claim that it's sort of like a switch flipped, and you're always writing. Even in your sleep, you're always thinking about it in the back of your mind. The true writing - when you're officially writing - that's just when its front of mind, but its always there. You're always listening for a hook.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

I like to listen to music that fits with what I'm writing. For each book, I've assembled a playlist, so readers can get a sense of what I was listening to while I was writing.

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

I start writing with an open mind without thinking about genre and realise, only after writing, that it falls under many genres.

I've always been drawn to the best writing that I can find. I don't care if it's in movies or theater or whatever - if you want to be in front of an audience, you have to do writing you believe in.

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!

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it's a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.

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

What's important with writing is that it comes from a place you absolutely love. I'm writing for film and TV. In America, they call people like me 'multi-hyphenators.'

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat.

It's OK to have a plan, to invest in your future - for your financial security, your love life, your personal fulfillment, and even your happiness. To have personal happiness as a stated goal doesn't detract from it if you get there.

Corporate career is like my wife, and writing is my girlfriend. My priority is the first but enjoy doing the second, as I have taken to writing as a stress-beater.

When I was at UCLA, a professor there encouraged me to write, and so I looked into specializing in creative writing in the English Department. And through that, I started writing plays.

As an actor, you go in your own personal life and pull from your personal life, so that's what I do.

What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing - I try to write every day, no matter what - and the joy that writing has given me.

As an undergraduate, I took a theology course titled Religion as Writing. If writing can be considered a form of faith, then inevitably doubt has to accompany it.

The Cry Baby character is so, like, based off of myself that it just really is just from personal experience. And when I was younger I was called a cry baby and made fun of for being super emotional and taking things way to personal.

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.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.

I deeply believe - and not just as a matter of politics, but even as a matter of morality - that matters about reproduction and intimacy and relationships and contraception are in the personal realm. They're moral decisions for individuals to make for themselves. And the last thing we need is government intruding into those personal decisions.

I studied writing at NYU. I graduated high school in Nashville and then went to the creative writing program, and in the first year, that's when I wrote 'Kids.'

If you say that the gospel lays a claim upon people, then you are invading their personal space, and they feel as though you have no right to be there. Now we don't even begin preaching the gospel until we get into their personal space and they feel the demands of God upon them.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

Individuality is a personal thing. It's based on your own personal feelings and expression of self. So, really, it's nobody's business to judge you but yourself. And if you feel that you're expressing yourself as an individual, and you feel confident in it, then that really should be all that matters.

I think service to others is the real key to winning our own personal freedom and the road to our own happiness, our own personal contentment and fulfillment.

In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.

I've been a comedian for a long time so writing and performing is a big part of what I do. If anybody's doing comedy they should also work on writing.

As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

Movies are definitely more fun because there are so many different seasons in a movie. It is exciting to be drafting together. Writing a book is very hard, it's like writing 15 college term papers in a row, and you are just like, "when is going to end?" You can communicate so much more when you are writing a book, and you can go so much deeper.

No, that's what I think God does to you. He gives you some great gig in which you make a whole heap of money, and you're just on top of the world and on every magazine cover, but your personal life is miserable. And for most of that time, I have to say, my personal life was pretty miserable.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

As a television producer, you do a lot of writing - drafting proposals for pilot shows and other things, so yes, a good deal of writing was involved.

That's what I love about writing is you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You can just get up in the morning, grab a pad and pen and start writing.

What I find is that many times when I work with chance, with indeterminacy, I am more open to experience, less prone to a fixed process, and I think it creates a very important challenge. It creates a way of writing that is, in a way, flatter or smooth, a surface conducive to release, to movement. And in this way, the form of writing gets delightfully melded with the process of the writing.

There is never a personal-life connection between my characters and myself. I'm a professional and I can access what I need to access, so there's no bleed-over. I didn't need to believe in aliens to play Mulder. As for my personal life, everything is fantastic right now.

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

I've always been a writer. I started getting paid for writing in college. Where it transitioned from commentary to journalism was in that shift - not wanting to write personal stories because people are hungry in not necessarily great ways for the sexy, sexy, sex work story. I was trying to shift the focus, and journalism was the tool I needed to write about people outside my own life and range of experience.

I started out being a stand up and writing my own material. That took me to 'Talk Soup,' where I was writing and performing for TV.

'Crash' was incredibly personal to me. So was 'In the Valley of Elah.' There were things in 'The Next Three Days' that were questions I was asking myself but couldn't answer, like how far would you go for love? Can you believe in somebody who can't even believe in themselves? But this is highly personal.