Writing Quotes · Page 558

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life.

— Jerzy Kosinski

If critics want to help me, let them come sit next to me while I'm writing.

— Rita Mae Brown

I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it's not easeful for me.

— Charles Krauthammer

“It wasn't my choice to write this story...it was my responsibility.”

— Rhonda Fink-Whitman

What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.

— Diane Mott Davidson

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

— Mark Twain

I've got all the discipline as an actress, but none whatsoever as a writer.

— Jean Marsh

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

— Eric Brown

I am a little pencil in God's hands. He does the thinking. He does the writing. He does everything and sometimes it…

— Mother Teresa

In terms of a "career," I never have long-term plans, and certainly don't want to spend several years, say, writing a "long"…

— Scott Bradfield

Reade was an emancipating writer because he seemed to speak as man to man to resolve history into an intelligible pattern in…

— William Winwood Reade

I feel that these stories are being written to articulate certain confusions and disappointments, and I do mean to shake up the…

— Ann Beattie

I can write a poem in 10 minutes. I like writing songs; I can write songs in 5 or 10 minutes. My…

— Shel Silverstein

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

— Alice Walker

There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you…

— Dan Castellaneta

I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake…

— Oscar Wilde

Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how…

— Guy Debord

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So…

— Don DeLillo

Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was…

— Omar N. Bradley

No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence…

— Dylan Thomas

“My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about,” she said. “Images, scenes, snatches of…

— Haruki Murakami

For me, there's a bad year of getting started on something. You write bad stuff and it's awkward to throw it out,…

— Whit Stillman

For the long-limbed trees and watery landscape of Vancouver Island, read Hundreds and Thousands. Setting aside, who can resist a woman who…

— Marjorie Celona

Writing is too hard not to do exactly what you want to do. It's a very draining and agonizing process for me,…

— Armistead Maupin

Fiction writers can’t be trusted. They make things up.

— Dan Poynter

The kind of fiction I'm trying to write is about telling the truth.

— Paul Auster

I like the community of acting better than the prison of writing. I like sets.

— Carrie Fisher

“To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.”

— Michel de Montaigne

“To all the librarians in the world on behalf of all the kids y’all helped grow up to be writers”

— Karin Slaughter

The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.

— John Updike

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.

— Roald Dahl

But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot

— Robert Lowell

“I love entering the private world that each writer gives us through their books”

— MBarreto Condado

“Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time.”

— Lailah Gifty Akita

A good editor is one of the sharpest tools a writer can have in her toolbox.

— Karin Slaughter

It's a lot easier to think of an app and write it than it is to convince people to want it,

— Steve Wozniak

I always knew that I was going to be a writer. There was no question in my mind about that.

— J. Michael Straczynski

When I am writing a novel I try not to read great prose stylists into which I will fall.

— Frederick Busch

“I am free to write what I want and my readers are free to think what they can”

— Marlowe Sr

“Words are the closest any of us can come to making something from nothing at all.”

— Danielle Ackley-McPhail