Top 1200 Writing Nonfiction Quotes & Sayings - Page 12

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.

Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It's while writing that I think most deeply about things.

Teaching writing puts you on the point of a pin in terms of what you want your own writing to be.

Before I started writing for myself, I was writing country records, and they were coming out dope.

Nicholson Baker talks about the way in which the most successful nonfiction books are those that can be boiled down into an argument so that everybody can wade in with an opinion without having to undergo the inconvenience of having to read the book itself. The more you can condense it, the better.

I spent as much time writing proposals in '98 and '99 as I did writing scripts.

I was always writing music anyway. I just sort of fell into it. Writing for me is a therapeutic process.

writing is how I understand everything that happens. Writing is the only way I know to move on.

For me, writing is a way of finding out about things I didn't know before I began writing.

For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.

These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.

I don't know if I have writing habits. Writing is impossible and every time I have to do it I kind of forget how.

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.

If a man means his writing seriously, he must mean to write well. But how can he write well until he learns to see what he has written badly. His progress toward good writing and his recognition of bad writing are bound to unfold at something like the same rate.

For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.

Usually I read several books at a time - old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything - and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

I'm trying my hand at writing. I'm writing a couple of projects for HBO, a half hour comedy and a miniseries.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

For me, writing for younger audiences and writing for adults uses two different halves of my brain.

I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.

Not writing is as important as writing - go out into the world and remember how interesting it, and the people in it, are.

I like the physical action of writing down by hand, and I don't just use it for writing my fiction.

There's such good writing now on television and I don't see a lot of great writing on films sadly.

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

I'm not a reader of young adult fiction for the simple reason that these novelists are writing for adolescents, so they are not writing for me.

When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

I love the resource of the Internet. I use it all the time. Anything I'm writing - for example, if I'm writing a scene about Washington D.C. and I want to know where this monument is, I can find it right away, I can get a picture of the monument, it just makes your life so much easier, especially if you're writing fiction. You can check stuff so much quicker, and I think that's all great for writers.

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

My parents read me some typical children's books: 'Green Eggs and Ham,' 'The Little Engine That Could,' 'Peter Rabbit.' But I quickly developed a preference for nonfiction books about baseball and math, by the likes of Bill James and Martin Gardner.

I'm probably writing music now for the same reason as I started writing songs when I was 14 - to meet women.

My first writing jobs were writing Tom Arnold specials for HBO, so I love working there.

Writing sucks. I think it's terrible. Writing is not fun, and don't trust anyone who claims to enjoy it. Liars!

When you're writing, at least when I'm writing, I don't think about themes and I try not to sermonize with any particular message.

Writing dialogue is like writing a song, which I've done.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.

If you want to take writing on, you should pay writing the respect it deserves, which is to say, reading it.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.

I've been writing articles for newspapers and magazines. And writing is a very beautiful way of expression.

One of the ready advantages of writing a road or quest story is that it mirrors the experience of writing a novel.

I'm not writing great literature. I'm writing commercial fiction for people to enjoy the stories and to like the characters.

[I] try to do both because the writing for me, to be a new artist, the writing is gonna pay the bills.

When I'm writing well, I feel happy. And when I go too long without writing, I begin to implode.

One of my rigid goals is to keep each book under 300 pages because I think so much nonfiction is literally weighty that people don't get through these books ... If people don't finish your book, then they don't know what you're talking about.

Writing, real writing, should leave a small sweet bruise somewhere on the writer . . . and on the reader.

I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.

You find yourself writing the truth, because it's like, 'Well, I ain't writing for anyone but myself anyway.'

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

Just write and love what you're writing. And if you're not loving what you're writing, take a look at why and fix that.

The cool thing about writing music, writing anything, is that once you publish it, it's there forever.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.

I keep my TV writing and my book writing almost wholly separate. The audiences feel so different.