Quotes about writing
writing may attributes
Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing, but if the writer deliberately aims at truth, he is likely to find that what he has hit is the didactic. Northrop Frye
writing style together
I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together. Norman Mailer
writing venture bypass
Amateurs... venture into scenes that a writer with more experience (and more professional concern) would bypass or eschew altogether.
writing adjectives mark
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
writing way
The way you write affects what you say.
writing character elude-you
To know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel. Novels go happiest when you discover something you did not know you knew: an insight into one of your opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you... a truth... that used to elude you.
writing damage desks
Only another writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It's an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself.
writing sweat after-hours
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
writing class alimony
Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
writing vision married
Since great writers communicate a vision of existence, one can't borrow their methods. The method is married to the vision.
writing simple years
Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.
writing two want
I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop.
writing littles rooms
Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write.
writing mean thinking
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry. Norman MacCaig
writing misunderstood
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
writing people happened
All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
writing
I got a call from an agent to come to New York City, and write for the 'Ford Star Revue.' Because at the time there wasn't much 'national television'. Norman Lear
writing comedy someday
I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.
writing los-angeles
I started by writing, with my partner Ed Simmons, a monologue for Danny Thomas, that he performed at Ciro's nightclub in Los Angeles.
writing umpires justice
Chief Justice [John] Roberts compared judges to umpires, who apply rules they did not write and cannot change to the competition before them. Orrin Hatch
writing ideas pins
You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin. Orson Welles
writing actors directors
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
writing film-critics impact
. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.
writing school mean
After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing. Ornette Coleman
writing player hard-times
After I left Texas and went to California, I had a hard time getting anyone to play anything that I was writing, so I had to end up playing them myself. And that's how I ended up just being a saxophone player.
writing expression years
Even when you write it, someone's got to play it. So if you can play it and bypass all the rest of the things, you're still doing as great as someone that has spent forty years trying to find out how to do that. I'm really pro-human beings, pro-expression of everything.
writing sacrifice years
I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics. Oriana Fallaci
writing remembrance needs
Writing my own diary is the best form of remembrance, but only for my own use. I need these notes; it's like an impulse. Orhan Pamuk
writing turkeys want
I am proud to be a Turk, and to write in Turkish about Turkey - and to have been translated into about 40 languages. But I don't want to politicize things by dramatizing them.
writing house freedom-of-speech
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
writing giving secret
I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public. O. Henry
writing alive theory
I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing. Octavia Butler
writing
I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing,