Writing Quotes

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.

Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the "writing style" of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.

People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing.

The way I write my songs is that I have to believe what I'm writing about, and that's why they always end up being so personal - because the kind of artists I like, they convince me, they totally win me over straight away in that thing. Like, 'Oh my God, this song is totally about me.'

I figure I wrote 37 songs in 20 years, and that's not exactly a full-time job. It wasn't that I was writing and writing and writing and quit. Every now and then I wrote something, and every now and then I didn't. The second just outnumbered the first.

People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.

I started writing songs when I was 10. It was a natural way to express myself as a kid. It wasn't until I started listening to jazz, joined the choir and picked up a guitar that my little hobby became something far more serious.

95% of the album is my writing, by choice, because it seems to be what the distributors want.