Writing Quotes - Page 121

What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

James Joyce

ligion is the opiate of the masses." "I did masses of opiates religiously.

Carrie Fisher

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

Steven Wright

Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.

Lili St. Crow

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.

Steven Wright

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Iris Murdoch

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Jules Renard

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

Mark Twain

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.", November 1913)

D.H. Lawrence

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

Peter De Vries

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

Gabriel García Márquez

I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.

Ann Brashares

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Mark Twain

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

P.G. Wodehouse

Writers don't make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don't work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make coffee, fry some eggs, read the paper, read part of a book, smell the book, wonder if perhaps we ourselves should work on our book, smell the book again, throw the book across the room because we are quite jealous that any other person wrote a book, feel terribly guilty about throwing the schmuck's book across the room because we secretly wonder if God in heaven noticed our evil jealousy, or worse, our laziness. We then lie across the couch facedown and mumble to God to forgive us because we are secretly afraid He is going to dry up all our words because we envied another man's stupid words. And for this, as I said, we are paid a dollar. We are worth so much more.

Donald Miller

Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.

Steve Martin

Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.

Frank Zappa

Here is a lesson in creative writing.First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.And I realize some of you may be having trouble deciding whether I am kidding or not. So from now on I will tell you when I'm kidding.For instance, join the National Guard or the Marines and teach democracy. I'm kidding.We are about to be attacked by Al Qaeda. Wave flags if you have them. That always seems to scare them away. I'm kidding.If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.", 1657)

Blaise Pascal

The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

Flannery O'Connor

It has often been saidthere’s so much to be read,you never can cramall those words in your head.So the writer who breedsmore words than he needsis making a chorefor the reader who reads.That's why my belief isthe briefer the brief is,the greater the sighof the reader's relief is.And that's why your bookshave such power and strength.You publish with shorth!(Shorth is better than length.)

Dr. Seuss

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Cornelia Funke

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Howard Nemerov

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

Flannery O'Connor

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Isaac Asimov

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Winston S. Churchill

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Douglas Adams

Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.

Veronica Roth

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning...

Walter Mosley

Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves.

Robert M. Drake

When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble.

Charles Bukowski

You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that.

Robert M. Drake

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have "essential" and "long overdue" meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. Rowling

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Virginia Woolf

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

Walter Mosley

It was never about the world being too big, it was more like she was too much for the world to handle.

Robert M. Drake

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Charles Baudelaire

She was broken from moment to moment, watching her world collide she felt lost inside herself. She fell apart for a passion that flamed beneath her. She waited and died a hundred times, it dripped from her pores. The moment she let go, she soared over the stillness like the star she was born to be.

Robert M. Drake

I had to learn to live without you and I couldn't make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you.

Robert M. Drake

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Jean M. Auel

Society will always be too fragile to accept us for all that makes us beautiful.

Robert M. Drake

Madness and chaos are self-destructing but over thinking is the suicide.

Robert M. Drake

If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

Benjamin Franklin

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Gertrude Stein

It’s funny, for all it took was a broken heart and that alone was enough, enough for her to do everything she ever dreamed of.

Robert M. Drake

If I lived a million lives, I would've felt a million feelings and I still would've fallen a million times for you.

Robert M. Drake

Suddenly, everything was beautiful. The way she viewed the world was nothing more but a reflection of herself.

Robert M. Drake

She was broken, I think it’s because she loved too much and she was always blind to the fact that love too is sometimes broken.

Robert M. Drake

Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa

The best kind of humans are the ones who stay.

Robert M. Drake

Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.

Shannon L. Alder

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Junot Díaz

A tamed woman will never leave her mark in the world.

Robert M. Drake

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Philip Pullman

Somewhere along the way we all go a bit mad. So burn, let go and dive into the horror, because maybe it’s the chaos which helps us find where we belong.

Robert M. Drake

Sometimes the most beautiful people are beautifully broken.

Robert M. Drake

Sometimes to self-discover you must self-destruct.

Robert M. Drake

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Henry David Thoreau

Previous 1 … 119 120 121 122 Next

Writing Quotes - Page 121

Related Topics