Writing Quotes · Page 511

“worksheets - the archenemy of abundant, purposeful reading (and discussion and writing).”

— Mike Schmoker

I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation.

— Robert Frost

Great books are written from a sense that there is nothing to lose.

— Matthew Specktor

When I write a story, it's not like I'm thinking about what I'm doing

— Stephenie Meyer

Hemingway said the only way to write about a place is to leave it.

— David Guterson

I see my writing as the process of looking at the usual, but from two steps to the side.

— Katherine Dunn

Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

— William Cowper

As a kid, I was just writing scripts and taking whatever film classes I could in college.

— Damien Chazelle

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of…

— Kevin Barry

Avoid theatrical flourishes - the phrases that sound so damned good that they stand up and beg to be recognized as "good…

— Donald Spoto

I want to be able to discuss craft but I also want to teach writers to trust their instincts and learn to…

— Mary J. Miller

'Eleanor' was so much fun to write, because there's a brutal honesty about her. She's got no filters and no concept of…

— Gail Honeyman

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and…

— Dawn Richard

He managed to do this 'tour de force' of styles without ever breaking the narrative structure of the chapter he was writing.…

— Frederick Lenz

It's still true that literary works by women, gays, and writers of color are often framed as specific, rather than universal, small…

— Cheryl Strayed

I'm interested in the economy of words and forms: jokes, aphorisms, copywriting, advertising, that way of writing when meaning has to be…

— Martine Syms

You have girls that sing about guys ain't paying their bills and men are this and men are that and I write…

— Kool Keith

I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to…

— Paul Laffoley

“Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't,…

— Mort W. Lumsden

Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert,…

— Mary Jo Salter

“So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over…

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four…

— Paul Theroux

I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting…

— Lynne Rae Perkins

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and…

— Doris Lessing

Don't take life so serious. It ain't no-hows permanent.

— Walt Kelly

To all my haters , I hope you know I'm writing this with my middle finger.

— Wiz Khalifa

“A writer must always be the no.1 fan of their book,”

— Aditi Dufare

Life Should Be Written With PencIl, So U CaN Go BaCk AnD ErAsE Ur MisTaKes

— Anonymous

Even I thought I would be a writer who put something out every year. But that's not how it worked out.

— Junot Diaz

I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.

— Jello Biafra

“Where the concrete kept his pain at bay, the page gave his pain a place to go.”

— Daniel Abbott

“Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.”

— Stephen King

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work

— Gay Talese

If I could, I'd write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence

— Paulo Coelho

My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.

— Laura Riding

When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books.

— John Logan

Sometimes I'll listen to a lyric and I'll be so pissed off that I didn't write it.

— King Krule

I loved every minute of the scripting, writing and developing of 'APL.'

— Rajpal Yadav

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

— Umberto Eco

The poem I want to write is impossible. A stone that floats.

— Charles Simic