Writing Quotes · Page 529

Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.

— John Steinbeck

Who's ever going to write a film in which I get the girl? Me!

— John Cleese

No one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write.

— Tony Gilroy

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

— Jorge Luis Borges

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.

— Giles Coren

Often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say.

— Etgar Keret

“Isn’t it written into the Parent Charter that they don’t have to approve of everything I do”

— Lia Peele

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

— Natalie Goldberg

I don't just sit down and write all day, or the songs would be weird or stupid. They would be about different…

— Syleena Johnson

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be…

— Janet Frame

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the…

— C. V. Wedgwood

I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which…

— Chang-Rae Lee

I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out…

— Tori Amos

As a writer and a director, I simply don’t have the time I need to write and prep the movie I would…

— Gary Ross

I look upon [writing about religion] as a nice way to get by in this precarious world, though I've never been able…

— Donald Ray Pollock

“I was curious and so for fun did analyze and came to the singular conclusion that if the woman you described were…

— Stacy Sorrells

“Think of it: a writer actually possesses the power to alter his past, to change what was once experienced as defeat into…

— Franz Wright

I'm lucky. I don't have to produce the whole movie. What I've been doing is just coming up with ideas for movies.…

— Stan Lee

Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is…

— Laura Mullen

There's a difference between writing, the written word, and music. When you have the blank page it doesn't make a sound, which…

— Jamie Lidell

“to paraphrase science writer John D. Barrow … we know they are impossible and yet we can imagine them anyway. Our brains,…

— Robert Krulwich

I think many people (like myself) prefer to read poetry mixed with prose; it gives you more to go by; the conventions…

— William Empson

You try to learn who you are. You work hard. You've either got it or you don't when it comes to writing…

— James Ellroy

Publishing and film are such different worlds for writers.

— Leigh Bardugo

Nothing you write is ever lost to you. At some other level your mind is working on it.

— Erica Jong

Normally, young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well.

— Zadie Smith

I dare you all to write one more thing that you won't say to my face.

— Marilyn Manson

Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.

— Larry L. King

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

— Neil Warnock

And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing.

— Sylvia Plath

When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.

— Sandra Cisneros

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

— Kurt Vonnegut

A science fiction writer should try to combine the intimately human with the grandly cosmic.

— Robert J. Sawyer

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

— Marguerite Duras

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

— Bethenny Frankel

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

— Stephen King

The adjective is the enemy of the noun. Variant: The adjective is the enemy of the substantive.

— Voltaire

Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

— Richard Yates

“It's all about the writing, and of course, the ghosts.”

— Debi Chestnut