Writing Quotes · Page 86

Write about what you're afraid of.

— Donald Barthelme

Write with the learned, pronounce with the vulgar.

— Benjamin Franklin

One writes to find words' meanings.

— Joy Williams

“The greatest writers have persistence.”

— Gina Nahai

Less is more, in prose as in architecture.

— Donald Hall

The chief virtue that language can have is clarity.

— Hippocrates

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

— Ernest Hemingway

“It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.”

— Jo Walton

“Why else do we write and write except to move our readers?”

— Jerome Charyn

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

— Zadie Smith

“You forget," I said, "I'm a writer and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.”

— Aldous Huxley

“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

You must become an expert on a product, service or anything you write about to really be effective.

— Joseph Sugarman

The best journalism is sometimes about footnotes—when we write small to say something big.

— Anthony Shadid

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

— Graham Swift

You have to write your own story, your own graph and rhythm.

— Chunky Pandey

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

— N. T. Wright

There has to be insight born of hindsight. Otherwise, you're only confessing your sins and asking the reader to forgive you. And…

— Meghan Daum

It's difficult for me to have a large story, a very large story - a novel is a large story. I'm used…

— Sandra Cisneros

When I started writing my stories, I thought that not only nobody outside my language, but nobody outside my neighbourhood would get…

— Etgar Keret

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

— Jennifer Weiner

I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

— Ashwin Sanghi

I wouldn't say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don't think I'm a comedian…

— Michael Pena

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we…

— Colm Meaney

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's…

— Daniel Radcliffe

Tone is a very difficult thing. You can't write tone, I don't think. You can try - you certainly try. I write…

— Beth Grant

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my…

— Anthony Burgess

“Good food depends as largely upon the judgment of the cook, as upon the materials used. These recipes and Household Hints are…

— Lydia Maria Gurney

When you have this long of a run [in The Big Bang Theory], you don't have to have something happen every episode.…

— Simon Helberg

Joe Walsh is somebody who... he's a writer, obviously, and he's a singer-songwriter, whatever, but at the end of the day, when…

— Robert Trujillo

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as…

— Colm Toibin

“If she was going to write a novel, she felt defeated before she began, because someone might be coming along to pick…

— L.L. Barkat

“Don't just read to read. Read to understand.”

— Jill Telford

There's more to the erotic life than explicitness.

— Jess C Scott

The writing is what's most important to me.

— Billy Lawrence

It takes me ages to write stuff.

— Chris Lilley

“She lives in the poetry she cannot write.”

— Oscar Wilde

Write as if you were dying.

— Annie Dillard

I don't write for a particular audience.

— August Wilson

I write for whoever needs to read it.

— Jacqueline Woodson