Top 1200 Writing Life Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

Writing music is just like writing a book.

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.

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.

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

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.

As I've picked up more responsibilities in life, I've found nearly every one of those extra burdens drains me in a way that makes writing more difficult. That may not be the case for everyone - I know plenty of writers and artists who seem to have energy in abundance for all the facets of life; but are they producing anything worthwhile?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

My writing process is a mix of research, personal experiences, washing the dishes, raising kids while thinking - then writing.

I don't think people need to know much about me to understand the book, or to enjoy it. The book stands by itself. Over the last several years, my life has been all about writing these books, but the books aren't about my life.

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

I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.

There are innumerable writing problems in an extended work. One book took a little more than six years. You, the writer, change in six years. The life around you changes. Your family changes. They grow up. They move away. The world is changing. You're also learning more about the subject. By the time you're writing the last chapters of the book, you know much more than you did when you started at the beginning.

It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.

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.

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

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

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.

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

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.

Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.

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

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.

It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

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

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 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.

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.

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

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I am writing to please myself, though there is a feeling in some place in my head that this may be publishable. I haven't been writing for nothing.

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

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.

There's been no nepotism in my acting artistic life, but I think it's been pretty clear in my writing life. I knew what a pantoum was at age 11 - I knew form - therefore I would win the poetry contest. But I also realized that I would never be a great writer.

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.

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 feel like communication is the same whether you're cooking for someone or singing or writing a song or writing a play or ordering from McDonald's.

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

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

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 to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life Besides, perfectionism will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force (these are words we are allowed to use in California).

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

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.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.