Quotes About Writing

I leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. It's just not where things are at right now, and it's just a matter of time until there's something going on where I feel compelled to write.

In 1957, I decided: write or perish.

What's weird is that anybody can write anything, and once it goes online, it's permanent. My very first biography on IMDb, which was written by a manager I had at the time, was not true.

In a way, novel writing is such a permanently student lifestyle. When it comes to movies, and you have to go to these meetings and try and impress people and get money out of them, I feel as though I'm playacting at being somebody who's grown up.

Acting is a job of permission. Someone has to give you permission to do it. But I have started to be like, 'I only want to do things that I want to do,' and writing has afforded me the luxury.

I think it's legitimate to do satire. If you're going to write a book of satire on Marilyn Monroe or Madonna, you're not going to get their permission, because you're going to make fun of them!

The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

If you want to write, just believe that you can, because it's about perseverance.

Who I love reading is Jordan Mechner, who wrote 'Prince of Persia.' He put all his journals while he was writing 'Prince of Persia' online.

My orange Persian Mews hangs out with me while I write.

If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knee and follow the comings and goings of my pen -sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved.

if there be some points which correspondence can never settle, but which can be made clear by conversation in two minutes, at other times just the opposite is the case: an objection clearly stated in writing, a doubt well expressed, which elicits a direct and positive reply, helps things along more than ten hours of oral intercourse!

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection-for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.

He who would be a writer, fine, Must take a deal of pains, Must criticize his every line, And mix his ink with brains.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written, and writing what deserves to be read.

Nulla dies sine linea - Not a day without a line.

There is nothing to write about, you say. Well then, write and let me know just this - that there is nothing to write about or tell me in the good old style if you are well. That's right. I am quite well.