Writing Quotes · Page 491

When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.

— Howard Nemerov

No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.

— Jacques Derrida

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

— Gene Fowler

If the writer does not cry, the reader does not cry.

— Robert Frost

“Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig.”

— Richelle E. Goodrich

Anyone can sit down and write some boring artistic song. Pop music is the hardest [stuff] to write.

— Britney Spears

You can get stale writing with each other for a while.

— Barry Mann

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

— Kat Edmonson

“Writing is not 'lonely work' but "alone work'; authors are known to be reclusive and like spending time with themselves.”

— Brie Edison

You've got to write badly. If you write badly at least you've got something to rewrite. If you're scared to write badly,…

— Tony Grisoni

Essayists write at a length that enables them, within a year, to explore a number of topics, whereas in a book, they'll…

— Marty Nemko

It's really important when we're writing our opinions to be transparent about what our decision method in the case is and how…

— Diane S. Sykes

A writer needs four things to achieve greatness, Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.” “That’s only three.” Alvis finished his wine. “You…

— Jess Walter

Writing takes too much patience and it takes too much out of you for me to want to attempt it too often.

— Vikramaditya Motwane

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

— Mary McCarthy

The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable…

— Italo Calvino

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or…

— Russell Freedman

“Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday…

— Bonnie Friedman

I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with…

— Teddy Thompson

“some differences between LXX and the MT. are more frequently to be attributed to defective writing, to ignorance on the part of…

— John Courtenay James

The nature of my work is my subjectivity meshed with other people's subjectivity. So there's a correspondence with that... Even if you…

— Tino Sehgal

An initial impulse of mine was to portray the way in which a city is impacted by war. But this is vague,…

— Said Sayrafiezadeh

“All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such…

— Nicholas Murray

Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9%…

— Matt Haig

I knew I was supposed to be a writer; I had made that declaration in the closet of my soul.

— Padgett Powell

A writer's job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as memories.

— John Irving

If you're writing on your own, each character is just you. It's just you.

— Gabourey Sidibe

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

— Andre Gide

When I have a problem, I write it down and ask St Joseph to sleep on it

— Pope Francis

Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I'm not a novelist, I'm a storyteller. There is no art in what I do, no mystique.

— Alistair Maclean

I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.

— Karin Slaughter

“Each blank page is an invitation to write; filling the space, however, is a challenge.”

— Paulo Ricardo Zargolin

If the devil could be persuaded to write a bible, he would title it, "You Only Live Once."

— Sydney J. Harris

I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.

— Marsha Norman

“For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.”

— Diane Setterfield

Even in the midst of love-making, writers are working on the description.

— Mason Cooley

Great writing is great writing. It's as simple as all that.

— Kate Mulgrew

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

— Yiyun Li

I think, for any writer, when you write, you just write.

— David Farr