Writing Quotes · Page 521

“A bad handwriting is as annoying to a reader … as an irritating voice is to a listener.”

— Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to…

— Salman Rushdie

My dear Smollett ... disgraces his talent by writing those stupid romances called history.

— Mary Wortley Montagu

“Consequently, we sympathize. We identify. We care. In fact, most writers would like you to identify”

— Francine Prose

The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.

— Susan Glaspell

A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!

— Donovan

I write in the most distressingly slow way in terms of punctuation and grammar.

— Maurice Saatchi

What lasts is what is written. We look to literature to find the essence of an age.

— Peter Brodie

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments…

— Carl Sandburg

Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets;Jonson was theVirgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I…

— John Dryden

he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing,…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of…

— Paddy Chayefsky

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

— W. Somerset Maugham

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice;…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study,…

— Venerable Bede

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for…

— Gaston Bachelard

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans.…

— Geraldine Brooks

I think that life is incredibly violent and that individual people are incredibly violent on one level or another. I don't try…

— Richard Grossman

“It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of…

— Truman Capote

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear…

— Lauren Oliver

I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the…

— Amy Poehler

“I stopped typing and started having a conversation about the blog post with my boyfriend. He said he’d liked the part where…

— Emily Gould

I'm not the most talented writer in the world. I know that. But I also know that I'm disciplined, that I work…

— David B. Coe

In making movies, time is so short-because it is so expensive-that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas…

— Mike Nichols

I have never written a book that was not born out of a question I needed to answer for myself.

— May Sarton

I love writing, and I am one of the people who can do it and make a living.

— Anna Todd

Shame can kill the imagination. It's hard to keep writing in the face of cultural derision.

— Eloisa James

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

— Simon Mawer

I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.

— Patricia Clarkson

“If you give a writer a line, they'll take a paragraph…”

— Suzanne McKenna Link

“How many books have been written just to know God? God is with you!”

— Dada Bhagwan

Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.

— Amy Tan

I would probably do anything with David Mamet. He's so great. I just love his writing.

— Val Kilmer

One of the things I have become aware of through the years is how much I love the people I write about.

— Hubert Selby, Jr

It's interesting when something's written about you, and there's comments after.

— Alison Stewart

I'm not really satisfied with anything I have written to date.

— Mike Gordon

Calvino was not a writer of hits; he was a writer of classics.

— William Weaver

“Writing is the most cathartic experience of my life.”

— April Wood

We write about things that we've done or things that have happened to people around us.

— Johnny Van Zant

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

— Franz Kafka