Quotes about writing
writing imagination interesting
Use your imagination. Trust me, your lives are not interesting. Don't write them down. W. P. Kinsella
writing use lines
Read! Read! Read! And then read some more. When you find something that thrills you, take it apart paragraph by paragraph, line by line, word by word, to see what made it so wonderful. Then use those tricks next time you write.
writing knowing said
I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write W. S. Merwin
writing good-love political
But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
writing style matter
Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music. Virgil Thomson
writing simple wish
The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.
writing years long
I seem to write an opera about every 20 years; if you live long enough you can write four operas. I finished my third in 1970.
writing play evil
I really didn't like Batgirl. I was like, "No, if I'm not gonna be Batman, I'm not gonna play." Maybe they could write an evil female super villain who takes over Batman, and nobody knows. Virginia Madsen
writing views trials
I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me. Vincent Bugliosi
writing trying you-like-it
I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.' W. H. Auden
writing proud fame
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
writing men dragons
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
writing men taught
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
writing night people
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
writing winning doe
How happy is the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.
writing chance lifetime
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
writing important age
It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, "What should I write at the age of sixty-four," but never, "What should I write in 1940.
writing views tyrants
All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers . If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants. William Cobbett
writing thinking
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
writing purpose ends
When I go to a music concert, I don't say, "My purpose is to get to the end and enjoy the finale." If that were the purpose, everybody would write finales and nothing more. The purpose of the concert is to enjoy each note as you go along. Wayne Dyer
writing long paper
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. Ursula K. Le Guin
writing mean kids
In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.
writing thinking way
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
writing thinking names
I don’t think ‘science fiction’ is a very good name for it, but it’s the name that we’ve got. It is different from other kinds of writing, I suppose, so it deserves a name of its own. But where I can get prickly and combative is, if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.
writing down-and
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
writing giving mind
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
writing hard-work waiting
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
writing class focus
Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class.
writing trying showing-up
I do try to separate my personal activism - showing up at a demonstration or something - from what I write.
writing fiction preacher
I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.
writing technology fiction
If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.
writing heart my-heart
I write with all my heart
writing people secret
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.