Writing Quotes

The desire to write grows with writing.

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I like writing about women, weak and strong, pathetic and heroic. I like writing about men, ditto. And all the variants of men and women, beasts and demons.

You have certain writing tools but generally creating something from nothing makes one quite mad and Cynthia and I are quite mad you know.

I went to Marion College for writing and I was kicked out of the writing school. I was asked to leave the writing program because I was corrupting the other students.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

This means I must pay close attention to the writing, but equally so to the scientific background - which sometimes means doing fairly involved calculations.

When I was writing my column, I would almost always be recognized when I was in a restaurant, even if I was reviewing it and had booked under a fake name, so free stuff would start coming out of the kitchen on a conveyer belt, fantastic wines would be opened at my table. Now I can't even get a reservation on the pizza joint on the corner.

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working.

Writing for somebody else is really fun 'cause I consider myself a songwriter first and foremost.

I don't exist without writing.

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.

People would say, Can we develop a sitcom around you? and I would say, Not interested. I'm very happy doing standup and writing and taking my kids to school.

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

People shout out for songs and I don't even remember writing them.

I think my voice worked out fine, but it was a lot of work for me. And I was very self-conscious about it. I was a bit self-conscious about writing lyrics too.

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels.

I touched an Oscar once. Friend of mine has one, for writing. As soon as I touched it, he said, Now you'll never win one.

The more you write, the more you're capable of writing.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

I don't think it's shameful to admit that some days your time can be better spent reading than writing.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.