Quotes about writing
writing poverty deadline
The best writing deadlines are poverty and death. Victor LaValle
writing trying narrative
In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources. Victor Davis Hanson
writing play tyrants
Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant. Victor Hugo
writing fighting hands
I write with one hand, but I fight with both.
writing horror-stories sometimes
Sometimes the biggest disasters aren't noticed at all - no one's around to write horror stories. Vernor Vinge
writing science ideas
When I began writing science fiction in the middle 60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
writing romantic-love thinking
This concept could easily have gone awry. Stories about love tend to go that way sometimes. They wander into the realm of cheese and never return, which I think is a shame, because there is a way to write about romantic love without breaking out the Velveeta. Veronica Roth
writing voice appreciate
I always appreciate people's opinions, but sometimes I have to take a step back and remember why I'm writing and what I want to do with it. Shutting out the voices is difficult but it's been good for me.
writing play world
I started writing because I decided I was too old to play pretend in the backyard. Then I found that I could create those imaginary worlds on the page.
writing
Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought. Stephen Covey
writing lizzy great-writers
Lizzy Weiss is such a great writer, and she really writes for the performances. Vanessa Marano
writing talking land
There has been a great deal said about a 3,00-mile high-angle rocket. The people who have been writing these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,000-mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city. Vannevar Bush
writing machines stuff
This was totally influenced by me and the direction that I am writing about and the stuff that I am writing about. There is just no way that you can be as intense as what I have been through in my life over a drum beat machine, sample, or loop; it's just not going to happen. Vanilla Ice
writing actors making-money
Well, yes, as I was a rather bad actor then and I wasn't making enough money, I thought, to make enough money to not make money as an actor, I'd better do some writing. Val Guest
writing stories novelists
The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists. V. S. Pritchett
writing suicidal home
The businessman who is a novelist is able to drop in on literature and feel no suicidal loss of esteem if the lady is not at home, and he can spend his life preparing without fuss for the awful interview.
writing mind landscape
Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.
writing details stories
Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.
writing government expression
I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do. Vaclav Klaus
writing challenges friendly
If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller. Val Kilmer
writing responsibility world
Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them. Vaclav Havel
writing people watches
It's exciting to watch people do and write and say what they feel like doing, writing and saying. Uzo Aduba
writing brain paper
The same parts of my brain get as excited as when I study bio or read a novel and write a paper on it. Utada Hikaru
writing wish would-be
I wish my prose to be transparent—I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure. V. S. Naipaul
writing support
Writing has to support itself.
writing littles narrative
If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.
writing oppression ifs
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
writing ideas intuition
The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
writing documentation details
All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there.
writing judging looks
That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing - which is never an easy thing to do.
writing hysteria comedy
One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.
writing two pieces
I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
writing life-is whatever-happens
My writing is authentic, and whatever happens in my life is what I write about. Tucker Max