Quotes About Writing

I love a good laugh as well, I think that's so important in life, which is probably why I've dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it's the most special thing in the world.

If history, as by most definitions, begins with writing, then the birth, rise and fall of ancient Mesopotamia occupies a full half of all history.

No book worth reading ever fails to be steeped with the spirit of the person who wrote it.

chasing. A retainer means "pay me now for work I may or may not do later." Hourly bills are exercises in creative writing. Our "research time" gets us paid to learn what we should have known or to re-learn what we have forgotten.

I've been writing a lot, I've a few projects I'm trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing... Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I'd be thrilled.

George wrote Taxman, and I played guitar on it. He wrote it in anger at finding out what the taxman did. He had never known before then what could happen to your money.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow – just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they right it down. It's simple.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.

Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? "She drove me to my practice at four in the morning," etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.

As I write this entry in my diary, I myself feel like a diary which has been left out in the rain, from which the moisture has washed away the cramped inky writing, the record of thousands of days and nights, leaving only a blank and sodden page.

Right now, it hasn't affected my music other than the fact that I don't have time to write any of it. That's no different from when I first started and I lived at home. I would play the guitar in the afternoon and then my mom or my dad would come home and I'd have to quit.

I can't discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines. You can't discover that in the raw. ~ Leonard Cohen

Normally, I name my characters after famous comedians.

When my father would yell at me, I told myself someday I'd use it in a book.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

I feel like a little kid in a toy shop. All those books. I've always wanted to be a writer, but before I met Ms. Finney, Barbara, I was afraid to tell anyone. I think it's some kind of miracle that all we have to work with is the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. And they turn into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, conversations, plays. It's just incredible to me.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

Special effects aside, we'll write clearer, cleaner, and more energetic sentences if we fill them with nouns, verbs, and adverbs rather than with prepositions and prepositional phrases.