Writing Quotes · Page 641

It's the writing, not the being read, that excites me. Joy is in the doing.

— Virginia Woolf

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.

— Maya Angelou

I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.

— Anthony Horowitz

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

— Stendhal

“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ”

— Agatha Christie

Younger writers and smaller writers need to live and get by. They need to be paid. It has to be fair.

— Nicola Roberts

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

— Tibor Fischer

It's so damn hard to write a great historical mystery based on fact. It's not for lack of trying.

— Jon Turteltaub

I write in a diary every night to collect my thoughts. It's very therapeutic to songwrite, because it's the same thing.

— Ella Mai

The challenging thing is that we go home after doing the run-through and the writers stay there working, so sometimes I get…

— Jillian Bach

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but…

— James Agee

An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace.

— Samuel Johnson

Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a…

— Rodney Crowell

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm…

— Mikhail Bulgakov

Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then…

— Doris Lessing

If the character is really well-rounded, and it's a really strong character, and if the writing is just fantastic, that's the thing…

— Amanda Abbington

Something that's good in the mini-culture of 'Happy Endings' is that the goal is to try and make each other laugh. There…

— Casey Wilson

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that…

— Robert Creeley

I had a plot connection that nobody understood for this fourth character, and decided, Oh, nobody gets it, that's all. I'll write…

— Richard Greenberg

“But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take…

— William Saroyan

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write…

— Wislawa Szymborska

When we talk about reviews, what we are really talking about is just a market report - it's like reading about the…

— Mike Nichols

Any time I put together a story collection, I don't know what it's going to look like overall - or even what…

— Brian Evenson

“Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think…

— Paul J. Silvia

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

— Walter Savage Landor

“Writing books is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.”

— Paulo Coelho

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

— Melvin Van Peebles

No writer, however popular, disdains a reader, however humble.

— Vera Caspary

Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.

— Nicholas Jarecki

I like people who can write and sing, and play an instrument.

— Sixto Rodriguez

If you write to me and it takes a day for me to write back, don't take it personally.

— Daniel Ek

“If you must break a rule, break it on purpose. That includes this rule.”

— Josh Steimle

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs.

— Bob Dylan

I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know.

— Patricia Hampl

Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.

— Octavia E. Butler

It's really not the genre for me, or the venue, it's the writing.

— Kathy Najimy

I am a writer. Books are my home and words are my friends.

— Vikrant Parsai

I sense that by writing both books and television, I've become better at each.

— Taylor Jenkins Reid

You can always be writer. It's not so much a metamorphosis as it is finding what you want.

— Jason Diamond