Writing Quotes · Page 423

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.

— David Simon

Writing a novel that crosses genres is a risk, but one well worth taking.

— Chet Williamson

Luxury has been railed at for two thousand years, in verse and in prose, and it has always been loved.

— Voltaire

“The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.”

— John Hughes

“We all write fiction when we write about the past.”

— Stephen King

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

— Marianne Moore

I spend as much time as I can in my garden, and if I'm not writing songs or gardening, I'm painting.

— Chris Rea

I think less than people think I do about politics. I care about writing.

— Orhan Pamuk

Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and…

— Ernest Hemingway

If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul.

— David Lehman

When you finish for the day, write a note reminding yourself of what you plan to do next. This helps you to…

— Nita Leland

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from…

— Guy Gavriel Kay

Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.

— Truman Capote

When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.

— Alessandra Stanley

I think I sing a few songs, and I sing them well, and one of them is the mob genre, you know,…

— Terence Winter

I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people…

— Saul Bellow

People are certainly impressed by the aura of creative power which a writer may wear, but can easily demolish it with a…

— Brian Stableford

I started writing songs before I could talk - at three or four. It was in me, and I had to get…

— Bibi Bourelly

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out…

— Naomi Shihab Nye

There's something, I think, that gets lost when we write something - something gets lost in the translation. So I speak everything…

— James Frey

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set…

— Andre Bazin

Maybe I've lost a little, but I think everyone does over time. People have been writing that I'm getting old every year,…

— Randy Johnson

“When I started school in 1958 there were no books written by Aboriginals in the school system and everything about Native life…

— Rick Revelle

It is made the duty of every Commanding Officer in the Department, to arrest and send to these Headquarters, under guard, every…

— Anonymous

When a writer tries to copy another writer, it's doomed to fail.

— Sophie Hannah

Art is action. The way I live my life to its highest degree is by writing, the practice of art.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I am a terrible, terrible typist. I could not have been a writer in the age of typewriters.

— Lisa Jewell

I think I developed a style of writing that was more, I guess, open for people to be able to interpret.

— Griff

I never thought I would write about Chicago, and I definitely never thought I would write a drama.

— Lena Waithe

“I breathe because I must, but I write to take your breath away.”

— J.M. Powers

So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a…

— Justin Long

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

— Mario Vargas Llosa

As writers, we can't predict who might come along who might find our offerings valuable.

— Wallace Shawn

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old…

— Richard Harding Davis

I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I nor the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom.

— Julia Louis-Dreyfus

I believe some people are just too damn smart to write fiction.

— Harry Crews

“And just because I've written this book, don't think I've changed. I'm like I was back then, really.”

— Ryū Murakami

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

— Toni Morrison

Writers must rely more on the feel of a sentence than on the dictates of a rule book.

— James J. Kilpatrick