Quotes About Writing

Everyone should write a book, if only to see how much work goes into even the slight volume I send you.

The fear of a work becoming dated is one of the most effective tools for keeping people from writing political work.

I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

I really wasn't equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I've always had the highest regard for the craft. I've always felt it was work.

Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

It's a lot of work to read a crummy script.

Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.

Writing for radio really focuses the mind, because you can't rely on thinking "Oh, just pull a funny face at the end of this sketch." You've got to try to work on the words.

If this whole writing thing doesn't work out, I'll be getting right back on the pole.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

I don't associate work with feelings of satisfaction. Rather, guilt, frustration, and resentment of people who write better than I do.

I should have written more. I should have written more during the period when I just liked so much doing the political work in the streets.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

I enjoy writing the same way I enjoy doing standup. Part of the challenge is being creative and making it work no matter what the constraints.

Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won't keep reading your work.

Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.

To do six to 10 episodes of high-quality writing, and then be able to go direct my own things, and do a movie, if it comes along, sure. I just want to act and do good work.

You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000-dollar-a-week writers and I will write it myself.

A writer judging his own work is like deceived husband - he is frequently the last person to appreciate the true state of affairs.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.

Singing always came naturally but the writing side is something I have always had to work hard at to get from good songs to great songs.