Writing Quotes · Page 362

“Writing is a gift. To be good at your gift you need to keep writing.”

— Lisa Powell

Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

— Charles Darwin

I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

— John Ashbery

Fairy tales and folk tales have always played a role in my writing in one way or another.

— Linn Ullmann

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

— Stephen King

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.

— Marie Lu

Virgil and Horace [were] the severest writers of the severest age.

— John Dryden

I have a tendency sometimes to get too logical with what I'm writing, just because I want it to be kind of…

— John Cleese

When I need to work up my nerve to write a tough column, I try to think of myself as Emma Peel…

— Maureen Dowd

“In response to a letter regarding the writer's lack of religious belief: The lack of faith is not doubt. It is certainty.”

— Abigail van Buren

The liberty of the press is a blessing when we are inclined to write against others, and a calamity when we find…

— Samuel Johnson

One of the achievements of which I am most proud was the codification, the writing into U.S. law, of the U.S. embargo…

— Lincoln Diaz-Balart

I'd always fantasized about writing a new play. Even when I had all this success in television, what I was daydreaming about…

— Zach Braff

“Instead of saying, ‘The writing in this scene isn’t good enough,’ you say, ‘Don’t you want people to walk out of the…

— Ed Catmull

Which is strange - I've always thought of myself as someone who writes out of difficulty. And I did do that, but…

— Maggie Smith

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging,…

— Edna Ferber

I start writing with only the vaguest idea about who my characters are and what is going to happen, and the characters…

— Karen Robards

It's not like I'm anti-China. I just think it's ridiculous that we allow them to do what they're doing to this country,…

— Donald Trump

Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we hear it, but it's hard consciously…

— Philip Gerard

I don't know that I ever wanted greatness, on its own. It seems rather like wanting to be an engineer, rather than…

— Roger Zelazny

“The Memorabilia, the abbey's small patrimony of knowledge out of the past, had been walled up in underground vaults to protect the…

— Walter M. Miller Jr

When I'm talking to somebody, I'll put a piece of paper on the table and I'll write what I call a conversation…

— Edward Boyden

I knew I had found my life's passion after writing my first column for The Washington Post. The response was like nothing…

— Michelle Singletary

To read and write will help you understand life. . .to sew and mend will help you survive it.

— Gail Tsukiyama

“I believe in magic. As a writer, I create them on blank paper.”

— Sonnia Kemmer

One must write poetry in such as way that if one threw the poem in a window, the pane would break.

— Daniil Kharms

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.

— Alastair Reynolds

“Joy's life in the doing (..) I mean it's the writing, not the being read that excites me.”

— Virginia Woolf

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

— Stephen King

I write a song for myself because I need to come out with that particular song.

— Tarja Turunen

I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.

— Victoria Coren Mitchell

Nashville has become sort of this go-to writing city for every genre.

— Maren Morris

Read critically, write consciously; speak clearly; tell your truth!

— Clint Smith

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

— Sharon Creech

It's very hard to write music for a film because you're writing about somebody else's experience.

— Alessandro Nivola

I need an office, so I can have a place where I don't write.

— Jonathan Safran Foer

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

— George Orwell

I didn't write to be famous; I wrote to keep a record.

— Gloria Emerson

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

— Leonard Bernstein