Before Quotes

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

The mind of the writer does indeed do something before it dies, and so does its owner, but I would be hard put to call it living.

Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.

I have before me a newspaper slip on which a writer expresses the opinion that no one should be allowed to possess more than one million dollars' worth of property.

I worked in Hollywood as a reader and a would-be writer for about 6 years before I sold my first story.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

Every writer is a writer of the generation before.

It's fun to write your set list 20 minutes before and keep the crew very much on their toes.

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.

Well, as a songwriter, it's really dangerous to use the word love in a song. It's a word that has been used in songs so many millions of times before, and it's the most popular topic to ever write about.

I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.

I had said before that I'd never write an autobiography because I've been around, and there's a lot that I've seen and heard that stays with me. That's just mine. I didn't want to do a kiss-and-tell, as some of my peers have.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

Before I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists.

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity - but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

Nothing is so wretched or foolish as to anticipate misfortunes. What madness is it to be expecting evil before it comes.

In falling markets, there is nothing that has not happened before. The bear or pessimist sees only the past, which imprisons the wretched financial soul in eternal circles of boom and bust and boom again.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

You know, we have a fiscal train wreck before us. And unless we act, and act deliberately, we're not going to enable our kids to have what we have. It's plain and simple as that.

But I've worked where they've had animals before, and animal wranglers, the people who raise animals and train animals for films and television, they're all very, very professional.

If I'm not afraid when I'm reading a script, that means I know I've done it before. If I read something and think, Wow, I can't play this part, then I want to play it more.

I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

As so often before, liberty has been wounded in the house of its friends.

The destruction of civilian hamlets, the killing and the wounding of civilians, became vastly greater than it had been before, and it was very upsetting; but I still couldn't bring myself to understand that the policy itself was wrong.

A lot of people don't realize that depression is an illness. I don't wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.

If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.