Writing Quotes

When my writing really started to take off was when I made a decision that I would write only what I wanted to write, and if 10 people wanted to hear it, that's fine.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Well, I'd had the Fat Mattress earlier as a writing outlet for songs and that.

I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

I want to release another CD this year, finish writing a screenplay, and make another short film.

The point of writing my name to you is that I see who you are, you see who I am... and that's what it's about.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

I think my writing is part of my ministry.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.

There is both a skill factor and an effort factor in dream recall. People can develop dream recall skills, such as lying still in the morning and writing down whatever comes to mind.

When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.

If I had to give up everything else and keep just one aspect of the job, I'd have to keep writing because I love it. Yes, I enjoy performing, too. But I couldn't give up writing material.

Publishing is a business. Writing may be art, but publishing, when all is said and done, comes down to dollars.

I don't think an actor's job is to be recognized. I think an actor's job is to facilitate the writing in a way that changes the way people think. No other business does that.

While I was a voracious movie-goer as a boy, I never put writing and films together in my mind.

I'm always in that mode - whenever I have a little free time, I'm always recording songs, writing, whatever I gotta do. It's like my job is my vacation.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.

The writing process for me is pretty much always the same - it's a solitary experience.

And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters.

Writing checks for charities is necessary and important. But it can't compare with corporal works of mercy, which are infinitely greater.

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

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.