Quotes About Writing

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

The key to writing is concentration, not inspiration. It requires deep attention to your characters, to the world they live in, and to the story you have to tell.

My diaries have always been my friends. The written word is so much more constant than human beings.

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith.

Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword.

IS IT POSSIBLE to be jealous of written words? To resent nocturnal scribblings as though they were the very flesh and blood of a sexual rival?

Presumably, God could have written these books any way He wanted. And if He wanted them to be understood in the spirit of twenty-first-century secular rationality, He could have left out all those bits about stoning people to death for adultery or witchcraft.

If a reporter doesn't like the person he's writing about, it shows up in his article.

I've had a great career in sports broadcasting - but I'm interested in lots of things. I like to write, I like to produce video projects, and I love to appear on stage.

I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.

I like writing for children. It seems to me that most people underestimate their understanding and the strength of their feelings and in my books for them I try to put this right.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

When I take up my pen to write, I feel the strength of standing up and refusing to be silent. In an oppressive situation, silence is death.

In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish - that is their strength.

In brief, we who write are all in the same boat, as if we are survivors of torpedoes, and we hope to reach the shores of thought with strength for more activity.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.

Writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Let my muse Fail of thy former helps, and only use Her inadulterate strength. What's done by me Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.

I write to give myself strength.

I think the thing that interests most actors these days is the strength and the quality of the writing. I think that's the main thing.

I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.

Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.

There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad.