Top 242 Writes Quotes

One writes what one can, or has to, write.

Whether I’m writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I’m always an actor’s director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I’m a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

Pete Moffat writes crime conspiracy thrillers so beautifully. He goes places other people wouldn’t; he is fearless.

For anybody who writes, very often, when you finish an album, you are so done with it. You’ve been listening in minutia, in super-focus.

And I haven’t read a lot of blogs but if someone writes about what they care about I’m sure it’s interesting.

The reason you can take the leap of faith with Stephen King, when it comes to the paranormal, or the things that happen in the world that he creates, is because the characters that he writes are accessible.

It’s great when it all comes together in a great musical like ‘Sweeney Todd,’ when Stephen Sondheim writes songs from heaven, the book is good and the staging is good. But it’s very rare when that happens.

I think of the part of me that writes as the most private self. It’s the part that’s engaged the least with the rest of the world’s needs.

You know, if an actor or, say, a basketball player writes a rhyme, it doesn’t mean he’s a rapper. You got to put in time. I don’t say I’m an actor.

It’s a shameful thing to admit for someone who writes such long books, but I read so slowly that I almost subvocalize.

When I was a kid, we used to play this thing called ‘the writing game’ with our father. My brother and I would play it – where first person writes a sentence, and the second person writes a sentence, and the third person writes a sentence, and so on until you get bored and have to go to bed.

Nowadays, everyone writes a cookbook. Models, singers, whatever, everybody thinks that they can do it and cook on TV. What they don’t understand is that if you want to do it well, you need to put in the hours.

Every writer writes in different ways, and so some write the music first, while others write the lyrics first, and some write while they are doing other things, and it is just nice to see how other writers are writing.

A friend and I started a band together. I am kind of learning how to play instruments. We write stuff over Skype or e-mail. I send one part and he writes another.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: ‘If she writes anything else, do let us know.’ Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

The joy I get from winning a major championship doesn’t even compare to the feeling I get when a kid writes a letter saying: ‘Thank you so much. You have changed my life.’

Tina Fey writes crazy, off-color, racist, hilarious stuff for ’30 Rock,’ but it’s always funny because you’re in this almost two-dimensional world where there’s Jenna Maroney and these over-the-top characters. That’s the framework.

The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them.

Writing is not a competitive sport. Everyone that writes has his or her own voice.

When I was a kid, we had this great advantage of there being no YA books. You read kid books and then went on to adult books. When I was 12 or 13, I read all of Steinbeck and Hemingway. I thought I should read everything a writer writes.

Maybe the ‘Million Little Pieces’ of the world are so popular because no one ever writes memoirs about PTA chairwomen; what memoirists do, and often get in trouble for, is bring interesting lives to light.

I’ll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about – and I think there are some writers who do that – but that hasn’t happened to me. I do think it’s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.

Anything that Aaron Sorkin writes, I could watch a million times. One of the few shows that I’ve watched in repeats was ‘The West Wing.’

If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart.

I am a huge fan of Adrian Piper: how she works, how she reveals her process in the work, how she writes about it.

All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had.

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It’s preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

A man who writes for a living does not have to go anywhere in particular, and he could rarely afford to if he wanted.

A writer doesn’t write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for.

There have been some brilliant and very successful standalone books that work in themselves and also seem to refresh a series. Anyone who writes a series lives in fear of it becoming stale, so you do whatever you can to keep it fresh – although it does feel a bit nerve-racking to write outside of your comfort zone.

The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

Britain is still seen as a beacon for decency, for democracy, for vigorous judges upholding the rule of law and, dare I say it, a free press. I respect the press in theory, but when you see some of the things it writes about you, it’s not exactly a happy relationship.

Most actors are starving. Most of us are walking around with a flashlight and tweezers looking for evidence. When you have someone that actually writes an acting role, it’s rare.

An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or if you’re a grown-up, it doesn’t matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend.

One who writes a poem writes it because the language prompts, or simply dictates, the next line.

I’m competitive with anyone who writes a good song – I don’t care if it’s a band or solo artist or whoever.

My father is a poet. He’s a literary giant of this country – writes in Hindi – and also quite unique because he has a Ph.D. in English Literature. He taught at Harvard University, which is one of the most prominent universities in the country.

I can’t judge myself by ‘God Only Knows.’ No one writes songs as good as that.

I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn’t realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.

I don’t actually have to think very hard when I’m writing. I mean, there are times where it’s a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you’re just struggling to keep up with it.

I don’t think of myself as a guy who writes for kids, I really don’t. I try really hard to write a good, solid sitcom.

Most important of all, there is no right or wrong way to write – there’s only what works for you. I was taught to write every day, but I know a writer (a bestseller at that!) who only writes on weekends.

I learn the lines that JK Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the ‘messages’ in a novel are put there by the reader. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. That’s how literature functions.

Scott Bradfield writes weird, oblique, unsettling stuff.

Neil Hamburger writes such cutting jokes.

I really love MFK Fisher’s food writing, and obviously Anthony Bourdain’s food writing is exceptional, in particular ‘A Cook’s Tour’. I really love the short story that he writes about revisiting the coastal town in France of his childhood and the memories that he has of his father.