Writing Quotes · Page 520

Memory is quite central for me. Part of it is that I like the actual texture of writing through memory.

— Kazuo Ishiguro

I was four when I announced my ambition to write, eight when I began publishing such claims.

— Taiye Selasi

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

— Mary Karr

Writing is so hard. And then, sometimes, it is so bewilderingly easy.

— Patricia Hampl

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

— Eric Clapton

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing

— Anne Tyler

“It takes a while before you begin to breathe the air the characters breathe.”

— Norman Rush

“There are many things you can lie your way through; poetry is not one of them.”

— Nicole Lyons

If you don't set your writing - teaching - at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop…

— M. H. Abrams

I owe what is best in my own development to the impression made by Kant's works, the sacred writings of the Hindus,…

— Arthur Schopenhauer

It is much more fun to write about villains then heroes. The villains are the ones that think out the scheme, and…

— D. J. MacHale

I suppose it's useful in designating writing that tends to come from personal experience, work that delineates an "I," but it's a…

— Matthea Harvey

I found all my reading and writing informed my music in subtle ways. Ravedeath came out of studying the pipe organ, going…

— Tim Hecker

I just started writing and writing for people. And then, like I guess after (a) year of getting some placements, I kinda…

— PJ Harvey

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the…

— Chinua Achebe

“A poet's work . . . to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world…

— Salman Rushdie

So, I would write songs... I sort of loved it and hated it in the sense that I would be like, it's…

— Dean Lewis

It was the first time, in the West Wing, I had ever read anyone write a Southerner properly. Because Southern women, in…

— Emily Procter

The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs,…

— Frank Ocean

“another hot summer night as I sit here and play at being a writer again. and the worst thing of course is…

— Charles Bukowski

I think writers always want to be taken seriously as writers, but it's not always possible. There's a difference between persistence and…

— Chris Kraus

If you want to be a serious writer, then you have to write what there is to write about. If you're going…

— Salman Rushdie

He that writes may be considered as a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he…

— Samuel Johnson

I feel like there's already a written narrative going on everywhere. All the different situations and realities you're in, like words floating…

— Bill Callahan

Whatever works for the piece I'm thinking about is the way I write.

— Glenn Branca

I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years.

— Richard Ford

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

— W. Somerset Maugham

I take talking as seriously as I do writing, acting and stand-up. Not everybody is good at talking.

— Robby Hoffman

Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child

— Anonymous

Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.

— Simon Beaufoy

You think of the book you'd most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.

— Anonymous

As one of your writers said, 'There are three kinds of lies: a small lie, a big lie and politics.

— Anonymous

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.

— Tori Amos

I don't wait for inspiration. I get up and write every day.

— Cathy Marie Buchanan

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

— William Gaddis

Whenever I write a story, I hope it appeals to both boys and girls.

— Suzanne Collins

Vivaldi didn't write 400 concertos; he wrote one concerto 400 times.

— Igor Stravinsky

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

— John Irving

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

— Lisel Mueller

When you ask, Did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.

— Judy Blume