Writing Quotes

I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

We were developing an innovative Personal Information Manager called Chandler but a couple years ago I took off from that to do a project writing down my memoirs essentially, reminiscing about the development of the Macintosh.

I don't think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don't come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.

Writing is like a contact sport, like football. You can get hurt, but you enjoy it.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

I have terrible handwriting. I now say it's a learning disability... but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

I've been working on my own music. I've been writing an album, stuff that's kind of personal to my own life.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed.

My history is really playing live - not writing or recording.

I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.

And every friend I've got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I'd never catch up.

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.