Writes Quotes

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

People have tremendous power, more than the average person understands, and certainly more than even I understood before I came to Congress. When any of my constituents writes me a letter, I promise you, we're listening.

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I wanted to be that quirky girl who writes funny songs that still have meaning.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

No one writes about the emotional things you go through.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

My son writes songs and plays. He sings like an angel.

It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.

Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

I'm not really one of those people who goes and writes some big back story and agonizes over characters. I think you kind of can get it. For me personally, it's just kind of more instinctive. But I don't have kind of an acting background. I fell into it accidentally.

Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.

Sometimes God writes straightforward in twisted lines.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

A good journalist is not the one that writes what people say, but the one that writes what he is supposed to write.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?