Top 1200 Writing Life Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

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'm too shy for personal appearances, and I've found out that anytime I talk about my writing, I can't do any writing for many weeks afterward.

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 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.

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

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.

Writing is my way of trying to understand vast things that probably I'll never truly understand, a way of exploring a Big Question, of wrestling meaning from the chaos of life. Consequently, when I choose to write overtly or even secretly about my real life, it's always something difficult and complicated that I'm longing to make sense of.

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!

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'm learning more about life when I'm playing too, and writing music. I'm learning more about life, the connection.

Knowing that a story needs to be told is a great motivator, even if telling a given story comes at a price. Writing Hunger has been the most difficult writing of my life, and it's the rawest and perhaps most necessary. We'll see how people take it. I always strive to write beyond personal catharsis because though I write first and foremost for myself, I do recognize that I need to look outward as much if not more than I look inward, so the reader has something with which they can engage.

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

Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The practicse of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes, 'The act of walking is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian; it is a special acting-out of the place...and it implies relations among differentiated positions.' I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

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.

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.'

This is the way life goes in Big Sur. Waiting for the mail, watching the sea-lions in the surf or the freighters on the horizon, sitting in the tubs at Hot Springs, once in a while a bit of drink - and, most of the time, working at what ever it is that you came here to work on, whether it be painting, writing, gardening or the simple art of living your own life.

So this is why I write. Because most times, your life isn’t funny the first time through. Most times, you can hardly stand it. That’s why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because since you can’t control life, at least you can control your version.

I am always writing music. I have got unlimited ideas because I have been clean and sober for my entire life.

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.

I don't believe in 'thinking' old. Although I've transitioned through many bodies - a baby, toddler, child, teen, young adult, mid-life and older adult - my spirit is unchanged. I support my body with exercise, my mind with reading and writing, and my spirit with the knowing that I am part of the Divine source of all life.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

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.

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.

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

Being a parent means my time use has to be a bit more focused, but it also gives me a new non-writing dimension to my life, which is a healthy thing. I can't wander along for weeks with an idea drifting through my head - I have someone who will drag me back into life, and that's a good thing.

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 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.

No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, I get dry spells. Sometimes I can't turn out a thing for three months. When one of those spells comes on I quit trying to work and go out and see something of life. You can't write a story that's got any life in it by sitting at a writing table and thinking. You've got to get out into the streets, into the crowds, talk with people, and feel the rush and throb of real life-that's the stimulant for a story writer.

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.

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

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?

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.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

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.

The writing process was some of the most exciting and rewarding moments of my life. It felt a lot like being in a band.

I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.

Aside from a brief stint as a writing tutor during graduate school, I have managed to avoid respectable employment all my adult life.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

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.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.

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

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've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write. But at times I have told myself that I don't necessarily have to publish anything 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.

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.

After three straight years of writing, though, I definitely needed a break to just go live my life.

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.

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.