Writing Quotes

The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

It won't be long before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there.

For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.

We still play Foreigner songs. I play the songs that I was involved in writing.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

When I'm writing a song, it gives me more actual pleasure to hear someone else sing it than do it meself.

I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something, and I was afraid it wouldn't be the writing.

People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.

You have to go where the good writing is.

As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really.

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

Yes, I very much like to have a personal stake in what I'm writing about.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

As an artist, you never want to write the same song again, you always want to challenge yourself to writing in a different way.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.