Writing Quotes

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

My father I liked, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play.

There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them.

I'd always loved to read - and come from a family of readers - but I never thought about writing as a career.

You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I just like to entertain myself by sitting down and writing songs.

I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.

Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

This 'Making Mirrors' album is far more personal, even if there's a character element to the sounds I'm working with. Every song on this album I stand behind; I feel like I have a close relationship with them. There are older songs where I can feel myself writing a story, so this is the first album where I'm proud of every lyric.'

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.

I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.

Do not let any record company disturb your creative flow. You are not writing for the record company. You're writing for the public.

While I have corrected agreed factual errors, I have not been inhibited from writing what I felt to be the truth about The Prince of Wales.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.

Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline.

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

The accidents of my life have given me the ability to make stories in which different parts of the world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes both - usually both. The difficulty in these stories is that if you write about everywhere you can end up writing about nowhere.

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point - to accelerate revolutionary development.

I didn't really start writing music or lyrics or turning them into songs until I went to San Francisco.