Top 1200 Successful Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

There is a fantasy in Redmond that Microsoft products are innovative, but this is based entirely on a peculiar confusion of the words "innovative" and "successful." Microsoft products are successful - they make a lot of money - but that doesn't make them innovative, or even particularly good.

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

Writing music is just like writing a book.

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.

I had horrible moment at the end of a very successful day, where I realized I just felt nothing about it and I didn't care. And I had that fear that I would, because I was successful at it, that I would be there 20, 30 years down the road, doing this job and just not caring about what I did.

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

You know when you're doing something right and when you're doing something wrong. As long as you feel like you're doing something right, and you're getting rewarded, then you're successful. But, if you're judging it on, Well, if I had that, I'd be successful - that doesn't work. I think doing what you love is success. Pretty cheesy. But it's true.

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

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.

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

On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.

There were successful ways of expressing the attitude and less successful ways. I think that spirit is very much alive today actually. That's what a certain generation of curators is alert to or on the look out for: an attitude. And it is a brilliant and moving spectacle when it happens. That suspension of disbelief is something that we all respond to. But it's hard to capture the butterfly without tearing the wings off of it.

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

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.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

I think it's dangerous to think you know what you're writing. I usually don't know, and usually I just discover it in the course of writing. I envy those writers who can outline a beginning, a middle, and end. Fitzgerald supposedly did it. John Irving does. Bret Easton Ellis does. But for me, the writing itself is the process of discovery. I can't see all that far ahead.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

It's insane to be a writer and not be a reader. When I'm writing I'm more likely to be reading four or five books at once, just in bits and pieces rather than subjecting myself to a really brilliant book and thinking, "Well what's the point of me writing anything?" I'm more likely to read a book through when I take a break from writing.

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

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

I've always been an all around creative person. Song writing and writing are great ways for me to express myself.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

If you want to catch a cold, hang out with sick people. If you want to lose, associate with losers. But if you want to become successful, go out of your way to associate with successful people.

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

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

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.

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.

Writing works when publications are writing and serving the best interest of their users; numbers are good yardstick but not a way to compensate a person.

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.

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

Everything I was told should be my greatest insecurities and weaknesses, everything that I've been labeled - short, nerdy, skinny, weak, impulsive, ugly, tomboy, poor, rebel, loud, freak, crazy - turned out to be my greatest strengths. I didn't become successful in spite of them. I became successful because of them.

There's exceptional work being done on television. Some of our great writers are writing for television. When you have things to choose from, you typically go after the writing - unless you're going after the money. There are fewer opportunities in film to make money with good writing, unless you're an action hero.

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

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

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.

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.

The research says that being successful doesn't automatically make you happier, but being happier - being more positive - makes you more successful.

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

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'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.

I love a lot of American writers, but I think that for the most part the scope of what's accepted as great American writing is very limited. What we have is good, but it's limited. There's not enough engagement with the world. Our literature's not adventurous enough. The influence of MFA writing tends to make things repetitive. The idea that writing can be taught has changed the whole conversation in the U.S.

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

I've never wanted to be a doctor, I've never wanted to be an engineer, I've never had that goal, but when you're around people who are successful, you kind of feel some type of way like, I don't want to be a doctor or lawyer but I do want to be successful.

I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance... Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.

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

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.