Top 515 Writing Quotes

Alan Moore’s writing is almost novelistic. It’s very intricate and wordy and smart.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that’s all you are – a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

I hate writing.

All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people’s backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability.

Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was, and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing, too. I don’t try; I just type.

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I’m supposed to be taking time off. But I’m still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.

The holy spirit means the invisible power of Jehovah, holy because he is holy. This power of Jehovah operated upon the minds of honest men who loved and who were devoted to righteousness, directing them in the writing of the Bible.

Writing about corporate America had sapped my energy, disappointed the editors, and unnerved me.

U2 is sort of song writing by accident really. We don’t really know what we’re doing and when we do, it doesn’t seem to help.

Writing books is fun because after I do a show for a couple hours, I’m in a bus for 22 hours. It’s not hard for me to look out the window and tell a joke here and there.

Writing is investigation.

Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.

I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I’d won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

I have a beautiful sofa, which is my writing corner, on which I sit every day and look outside the window.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‘I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.’

I like to oversee what I do, so I have a hand in writing my songs. I also have people there to help me with my vision.

When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I’d constantly be that guy who’d get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.

My greatest strength as a child, I realize now, was my imagination. While every other kid was reading and writing, I had seven whole hours a day to practice my imagination. When do you get that space in your life, ever?

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn’t writing my own things or directing my own movies.

School is something that you learn – reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community.

I’m not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Writing is frustration – it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.

I was always writing, since I was, like, 12.

I remember reading the book ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad,’ and I remember writing my goals down, and my number one goal in life was just to be a good husband and a good father someday. That was number one, as a 17-year-old kid.

I suppose ‘Gladiator’ could be a Western – if you were writing your review in Athens, that is! To be honest, we didn’t really think that way at the time. But there is common ground. And they both have horses – I liked that, obviously.

Everyone who has ever met me for at least five minutes knows I’m a really funny person. I love to laugh and to make people laugh, so writing comedy comes naturally to me.

Good sense is both the first principal and the parent source of good writing.

I love writing songs. I love doing my radio show and talking to the fans and listening to what they have to say, but there’s a certain responsibility that comes along with being given the gift of music. I take that seriously, but at the same time I try to use it to do something that makes a difference in a positive way.

Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory.

I am less selfish. But I am more insistent on being part of the creative experience. I find I am a better mother, lover and wife when I am writing. When my daughter was small I wasn’t writing as much and I didn’t miss it.

At the beginning of writing fiction, too much of the newspaper style was getting into the prose, so I thought, ‘Gee, I should try writing longhand. Maybe I can tap something that goes back to the point before I could type.’

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.

People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it’s very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing ‘Love in the Time of Cholera.’

Writing and drawing comics for the sheer joy of it – that’s true bliss.

The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from ‘The Mistress of Spices.’

I never produce a song, whether writing it or making a beat, and give it a wack visual or wack performance. I’m like a trifecta.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn’t all of a sudden make us best selling authors.

What I do know is that writing is the thing I am best at, and I don’t have the stomach, the ability, the strength or the courage to enter the political arena. And I think writing can be a political act, if only to let those people accountable know they are being watched. Literature can be a conscience.

I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

If you want to be a writer, don’t worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

I have a foot here and a foot in some spirit world. There are many more layers to reality, and that permeates my life and my writing in a very natural way. I don’t even think about it.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.