Writing Quotes · Page 1,350

“The writer, without softening his vision, is obliged to capture or conjure readers. And this means any kind of reader. It means…

— Anonymous

I have the right ideas, but my words are too... complicated. I need to simplify them, so that people won't get lost…

— Jack Kerouac

“I started keeping journals when I was fourteen and at last count had nearly a thousand. They come in all shapes and…

— Oliver Sacks

“If you want to master the art of the sentence, you must first accept a somewhat unpleasant truth--something a lot of writers…

— June Casagrande

“Work—especially the sort of work that gets your hands dirty and that brands you as a member of the working class—no longer…

— Gerald Howard

If you're trying to convey a crucial emotional truth, you have to be in total control of the emotional pacing of the…

— Kevin Keck

I just write about what I feel I want to write about. I'm like a kid. I get an idea, and it's…

— Stephen King

You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This…

— David Morrell

For me, the enemy is procrastination, and losing attention, you know? It's not the writing that's difficult, it's sitting down to write…

— Moshe Kasher

I love meeting 'the Odd Man Out' - like fans of 'Baywatch' who regret, as I do, that Tower 12 Productions didn't…

— Nicole Eggert

In my work at 'Entertainment Weekly,' I had written reviews and news stories about YA books and film franchises and was always…

— Jeff Giles

Writing is like shouting into the world. So when someone shouts back, it's a really big deal. To have people who read…

— Celeste Ng

Success is being artistically fulfilled and happy. You can't control how people see your movie or how much money it makes...and the…

— Ansel Elgort

I knew Chester. I've known Chester since 2001. I was in a band called Dry Cell, and we were signed by the…

— Jeff Gutt

The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is…

— Robert M. Pirsig

“Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert…

— Ezra Pound

I am of the generation of writers who can get instant feedback from readers within hours of publication. The fan forum is…

— Michael Scott

I tend to cut David Brooks more slack than most people I know do, and I do it for one main reason.…

— Michael Tomasky

“So you want to be a writer if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it.…

— Charles Bukowski

“Now I ask you to consider writing from the inside, to convince yourself of your characters' dimensions before you attempt to narrate…

— Tin House Books

When you hit the unimaginable, the only answer is imaginativeness. You have to heal with the person that you're suffering with. You…

— Bruce Feiler

Fiction writing is a twenty-four-hou r-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent,…

— Terry Brooks

I wanted to take a damaged individual in a damaged society with damaged relationships between nations and take a look at how…

— Steven Knight

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to…

— Sam Shepard

There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens…

— Ernest Hemingway

I write in the morning from about eight till noon, and sometimes again a bit in the afternoon. In the morning I…

— Gene Hackman

It makes me boil when I think of the power we profess and the utter impotency of our action. Believers who know…

— Jim Elliot

Some of the young kids look for one hit to be a star; that what they're known for the rest of their…

— Ruben Santiago-Hudson

The obscurity, incredibility and obscenity, so conspicuous in many parts of it, would justly condemn the works of a modern writer. It…

— Elihu Palmer

I got jury duty and I didn't want to go, so my friend said, "You should write something really really racist on…

— Sarah Silverman

I absolutely fell in love with David Cristofanos writing. THE GIRL SHE USED TO BE is that rare novel--its the one youve…

— Johanna Edwards

“Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots’), Awlaki claimed that Muslims ‘are suffering…

— Pankaj Mishra

“A conscious act grew out of this by the time I began writing stories: getting my distance, a prerequisite of my understanding…

— Eudora Welty

I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial…

— Samuel Beckett

“our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most…

— Laurence Sterne

Charity is just writing checks and not being engaged. Philanthropy, to me, is being engaged, not only with your resources but getting…

— Eli Broad

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a…

— Ken Liu

'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a…

— Jim Beaver

“I feel strongly against professionalism, against someone’s feeling he has to write a book every year to keep his name before the…

— Peter Taylor

All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called…

— Truman Capote