Writing Quotes

Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.

As an actor, I go where the good writing is. That's the bottom line.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It was the only consolation I could find.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!

I've learned to allow myself the room to fall in love with what I'm writing.

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.

I'm just not that comfortable writing so much about myself.

I do a lot of writing about my family.