Top 1200 Writing Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

When my second husband shouted, 'Me or your writing!' I replied, 'My writing.' We separated.

The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.

Ready writing makes not good writing, but good writing brings on ready writing.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

As one of the first editors at 'Outside' magazine in 1975, it was my contention that most American writing going back to James Fennimore Cooper and then through Twain up to Hemingway had been outdoor writing. At that time, adventure writing meant stuff like 'Saga' or 'Argosy.' 'Death Race with the Jungle Leper Army!' That kind of thing.

I see writing and acting as different parts of the same continuum. Writing is better for intense emotion. If you're very angry about something, you shouldn't present it as strongly when you're acting. But if you're really angry and writing about it, that's the best way to get it out and across.

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

I've been writing for a long time, since the late '60s. But it hasn't been in the same form. I used to write scripts for television. I wrote for my comedy act. Then I wrote screenplays, and then I started writing New Yorker essays, and then I started writing plays. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the New Yorker essays, but they were comic. I didn't start writing prose, really, until the '90s. In my head, there was a link between everything. One thing led to another.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

It's much harder when you're writing about your life, than when you're writing fiction.

Writing is not just the technical act of your fingers on the keyboard. Writing is living.

And [now] I think I’ll probably write a lot about birds. My new house has a deck that wraps around my writing room; my writing room has many windows, and outside the windows I’ve hung bird feeders … for enticing different species. So I imagine I will be writing about that.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Writing is sacred, other activities are profane, and I don't want them to corrupt my writing.

Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

The very dull truth is that writing love scenes is the same as writing other scenes - your job is to be fully engaged in the character's experience. What does this mean to them? How are they changed by it, or not? I remember being a little nervous, as I am when writing any high-stakes, intense scene (death, sex, grief, joy).

I was writing since I can remember - I just didn't know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.

O MY WIFE-who made the writing of my previous book a pleasure and writing of the present one a necessity.

Usually with film writing I start with characters, and set about writing their story.

I'd really like to see smart sex writing, writing that can take sex apart and try to put it back together, that doesn't just put a box around "sex writing" and give it glaring neon lights but assumes that sex is part of everything else in our lives.

I'm writing new music all the time. I'm just not writing pop stuff. It's not my goal.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

I do want to work on writing, because writing's a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it's intimidating as hell.

I didn't know how story worked. So, when writing the screenplay, people introduced me to the science of it. And I'm grateful. I'll probably use that information for the rest of my career, in terms of writing novels or writing stories. And then, of course, to help me live a better story, a more meaningful story

Writing is hard work, not magic. It begins with deciding why you are writing and whom you are writing for. What is your intent? What do you want the reader to get out of it? What do you want to get out of it. It's also about making a serious time commitment and getting the project done.

I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

Writing has taught me a lot - though far from everything - about writing, so as time has passed, it has become more pleasurable if not easier. I've done other things in life, but writing is by a factor of 10 the most difficult among them. And, of course, you never achieve what you set out to achieve, so you must keep on trying to do better.

I like acting and things when I like the writing. If I don't like the writing, I don't like acting. I think in some ways everything starts for me from the place of writing.

'The Sopranos' all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good.

Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

I do a lot of writing. People don't actually know how much writing really I do.

Reading and writing don't inevitably go together. You can read without learning a thing about writing, grammar, or spelling, although, you certainly can't learn anything about writing, grammar, or spelling unless you read.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

I despise writing in general, but yeah, I love writing the stuff that I direct.

When I'm writing, I'm in an isolation chamber. I'm not one to think about that outside world stuff when I'm writing.

When you're not writing, you're not doing anything else either because everything you do goes into the writing.

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

Well, predominately, if I'm writing for another artist, I'm sitting there with them and we're writing it together.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

If I really considered myself a writer, I wouldn't be writing screenplays. I'd be writing novels.

Writing for other people is easier than writing for myself - it's not as personal.

When I wrote for Jordan Knight, I was 17 or 18, they were pretty much the only songs I was writing. By the time people like Christina or Usher came around, I was able to know that I was writing for different points of view and people that might not want to say certain things. So you have to be considerate of whichever artist you're writing for.

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

I love writing traditional magazine pieces, and especially their breadth of reporting and the deliberateness of the writing.

I'm out here to bomb, period. That's what I started for. I didn't start writing to go to Paris, I didn't start writing to do canvases. I started writing to bomb... destroy all lines.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.

I usually dread writing non-fiction. I don't feel comfortable or confident writing essays and the like.

Writing with a film in mind - writing like a screenplay - is a sureshot recipe for disaster.

Writing was always a laborious thing for me. I never wrote fluently, I never wrote fluidly, there was something very awkward in my writing. But it seemed to me purposely awkward. It's almost as if I made the labor part of writing.

There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it.

I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.

I wish I had time to do more reading, but I just haven't had much time. But I still find time for writing. I've always preferred writing over reading, even though those things do go hand in hand. But when I do have time, even if it's not writing music, just writing in general - ideas and stories and things like that.

There's no better satisfaction than writing. I feel that writing is the best and everything else comes with it

For me, the hardest part is getting up and writing, that's the hard part. I always felt like I could teach someone to direct if I really had to. I feel like it's a skill that's passable, but writing... writing is the worst. That's what I'm doing right now, it's just the hardest thing that you'll ever do.

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.