Writing Quotes · Page 279

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

— Joan Didion

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

— Margaret Fuller

Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but live for it.

— Anonymous

I never set out to write a certain kind of song, I just play my guitar and see if I catch something.

— Chris Isaak

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

— Bret Easton Ellis

A writer should give direct certainty; explanations are so much water poured into the wine.

— Virginia Woolf

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

— Christopher McQuarrie

To write for a living, according to Mr. Whipple, is coquetting with starvation.

— Francis Alexander Durivage

I don’t think I would ever want to be a writer of detective stories - but I would like to be a…

— Mary Lavin

“We are the living Scripture being written in our time, and it is in the grit of our lives that god writes…

— Johanna

I am flying back to New York as I write this. I will never forget these wonderful 35 days and I would…

— Tony Visconti

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

— Will Self

When I dropped out of high school at age 16, I didn't know I was going to become a writer - I…

— Philipp Meyer

One of the things I liked about writing for a magazine was a kind of anonymity. When you do books, it's different…

— Hilton Als

“What would life be like without her writing? Writing filled her life with beauty and mystery, gave it life...and promise.”

— Maud Hart Lovelace

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop…

— Neil Gaiman

I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and…

— Alan Lightman

Love is a story we tell with another person. It's cocreation through conarration. When you hit bumps in the road and challenges,…

— Bruce Feiler

“It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of…

— Kory Stamper

You can kind of ask around for details. You might get a little information here and there, even from the other actors,…

— Gretchen Mol

When I began research, I read the writings of the Sonderkommandos. They are not well known, but these prisoners wrote from the…

— Laszlo Nemes

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the…

— Dani Shapiro

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't…

— Jodi Picoult

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure -…

— Michel Leiris

“That's what lifts us up, us writers: we have our imagination, if nothing else.”

— M. Beth Bloom

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

— Franz Wright

“Some of us can live without a society but not without a family.”

— Amit Kalantri

Every writer I've ever spoken to feels fraudulent in some way or other.

— Stephen Sondheim

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

— Howard Nemerov

Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how such things get around.

— Elizabeth Shaw Melville

I wouldn't say I was a born writer; I'm a born thinker.

— John Lennon

I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book.

— Carl Hiaasen

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

— George R. R. Martin

“The most difficult thing about writing; is writing the first line.”

— Amit Kalantri

A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller.

— Young-Ha Kim

The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.

— Colum McCann

A Train was born without any effort - if was like writing a letter to a friend.

— Billy Strayhorn

Writing is my refuge. It's where I go. It's where I find that integrity I have.

— Charles Bartlett Johnson

[Truman Capote] was not only just selling his writing, but he was selling himself as a person.

— Philip Seymour Hoffman

“Oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage.” —TESS LYNCH, WRITER, GENTLEWOMAN, AND ESSAYIST”

— Pam Grout