Top 1200 Research And Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

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.

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 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.

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?

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 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 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 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 don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

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 dabbled in writing, wrote really bad poetry in high school. I also took a few writing classes when I was an undergrad at Stanford. I was so intimidated.

For me personally, I'm always writing from what's happening in my emotional life. Even without thinking about it a lot of the time, it comes out in the songs that I'm writing.

I like to erase lines between categories. Why separate cookbook writing from writing, healthy from good tasting? I want to be open to possibilities.

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.'

I have enjoyed writing songs for so long... it felt like in order to make music that I could relate to myself, I would have to be a part of the writing process.

I believe in myself enough to not get hung up on what other people are doing, or what I should be writing, or the nature of how I'm writing. I'm just able.

To me, cooking is man's natural activity. But I think writing is really hard. Certainly writing fiction is the hardest thing I've ever done.

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.

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.

I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I'm doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like to believe my suspense novels marry the strong characters from my romance writing past, with the twisty, clever plots of my mystery writing present.

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.

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.

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.

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.

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.

My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.

That's really the essence of what any fiction writer does. Some of it is research-based, but most of it is a really long-term, imaginative, empathetic effort to see the world the way someone whose experiences remote from yours might see it. Not every writer works that way; some writers make a wonderful career out of writing books that adhere very closely to how they view the world. The further I go with this, the more interested I get in trying to imagine my way into other perspectives that at first seem foreign to me.

Certain people want to binge-watch stuff, and they want 10 solid hours of whatever, not realizing that writing 10 hours of quality television is a exhausting experience. Writing an hour and a half is a warm hug compared to writing 10 hours of television.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.

I don't let myself believe in writer's block. I feel very strongly writing is habit as much as an art or a craft. And if you write crap, you're still writing.

Writing can't be too calculated. My best writing is when I set it aside, move on. It's not when I'm crafting a sentence, thinking about what word should follow another.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

I started writing after the death of my grandfather - memories, poems, etc. It was very personal; for years I did not share my writing with anyone.

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.

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.

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

I enjoyed writing stories whenever there was call to do it at school, and started writing bad poetry when I was doing my GCSEs - like most people, I think.

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

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

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

Metafiction says something. It has to do with taking a large fiction itself and writing within it; that kind of self-reflecting writing that emerges from it can be thought of as metafictional.

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.

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.

The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.

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.

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.

With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

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.

You know when you're writing, and it's just you and the computer screen, and you never think that anyone is ever going to read it... you're able to say private things when you're writing.