Writing Quotes · Page 462

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevski, all of us.

— William Faulkner

“Believe none of what you hear. Half of what you see. And everything you write.”

— Jeph Loeb

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

— A. S. Byatt

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

— Anais Nin

I love writing for myself. I read them [my stories], I cry over them sometimes.

— Grace Ogot

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

— Charles Bukowski

“A pen is not just a writing instrument, it's an object of creation.”

— Ayanda Xaba

I think of myself as a realistic writer, not a creator of soap opera or melodrama.

— Joyce Maynard

I love writing songs and being a musician, but you can't really buy the feeling of connecting with people.

— Michael Kiwanuka

“You can write the most wonderful book in the world. But if people don’t know about your book they won’t know to…

— Madi Preda

I don't really see how any song can not feel contrived if it isn't honest, and how could I write honest songs…

— Lily Allen

“Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency . . . to get the book written. If a writer has to rob…

— William Faulkner

“Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more…

— Ernest Hemingway

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me…

— Jim Woodring

“Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [ Time Magazine , October 31, 1977]”

— John Osborne

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and…

— Maria Montessori

I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal.…

— John le Carre

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than…

— Corey Taylor

It's weird. I went so far away from music that I had to re-invent music again. I had to come back to…

— Domino Kirke

As for discipline—it's important, but sort of overrated. The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing…

— Elizabeth Gilbert

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put…

— Paul Dini

I began to think about the extent to which nude and semi-nude female bodies are commonplace in our present day culture and…

— Denise Duhamel

“All extra-Biblical writings, which must have been composed in the great days of the two kingdoms, have disappeared. It is to be…

— James John Courtenay

Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't…

— Isobelle Carmody

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

— Derek Walcott

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

— Janis Ian

I dream about singing. I would love to sing and write.

— Emmanuelle Beart

I want to write musicals for my whole life. I always did.

— Tim Minchin

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.

— John Steinbeck

If four or five days go by, and I haven't written anything, I feel incomplete.

— Ruskin Bond

I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.

— Sally Rooney

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

— Guy Kawasaki

“... a writer concocts a different story for every reader.”

— Mike Bryan

American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.

— Gore Vidal

“Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting.”

— Robin Laws

A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.

— Daniel Wallace

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

They ask me what I'm writing for - I'm writing to show you what we're fighting for.

— Talib Kweli

“Whenever someone says, 'I love writing,' I always think, 'You probably suck at writing.”

— Bob Odenkirk

“Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.”

— Stephen Jones