Writing Quotes

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.

Writing is an antidote for loneliness.

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

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 have no interest in writing, directing or producing.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

Oh, I had an idea for a pilot of my own at the time, and then Carl sent me about eight scripts and simply I threw my idea out the window because the writing was just so good.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

I focus on the writing and let the rest of the process take care of itself. I've learned to trust my own instincts and I've also learned to take risks.

I was an A student and I liked creative writing.

I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.

DeLillo never seems committed to me to what he is writing. Very nice surfaces, but he's got nothing underneath.

The real beauty of it - key to my life was playing key chords on a banjo. For somebody else it may be a golf club that mom and dad put in their hands or a baseball or ballet lessons. Real gift to give to me and put it in writing.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.