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Quotes About Writing

It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.
~ Lynn Abbey
Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks.
~ Jimmy Breslin
No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.
~ Horace
Computers absolutely changed my life. Before I had a computer, I had never written one thing. Not one thing. I'm a very bad speller and I was embarrassed by that. When I would type, the little mistakes would make me nutty, and I would never edit anything.
~ Penn Jillette
Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
~ P. L. Travers
My relationship with my father still troubles me because it never got resolved, and there was no closure. There was a lot of bitterness, but having written about it, I found that I was able to overcome that bitterness and look at the relationship anew.
~ Naseeruddin Shah
I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid.
~ Lewis Hamilton
When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can't write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the 'i's' small.
~ Charles Bukowski
Written reports stifle creativity.
~ Ross Perot
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
~ Virginia Woolf
I think the computer is a hindrance to good writing because it is so tempting to leave what you've written. If you use a typewriter, you must retype if you make a mistake, and thus, you must re-examine every word.
~ Edith Pearlman
Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.
~ Charlie Kaufman
'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.
~ Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.
~ Arthur Golden
I made my living in comedy, but I'm not a silly person. I've got all these sides to me. Even in my movies that I've written myself, the characters sometimes border on great anger or nutsiness or other kinds of behavior. I'm not just doing fart jokes for two hours.
~ Albert Brooks
Hundreds of people who've never written before send in 'Dr. Who' scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.
~ Douglas Adams
This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.
~ George Burns
It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.
~ Tom Stoppard
I couldn't think of anything more pointless than reading a piece of fiction written by a robot.
~ Alastair Reynolds
Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I've written, are stories driven by characters.
~ Dolly Parton
There are some different things I'm writing and developing, but I don't know where they'll go. They're fun stuff that I would be in and are written in my voice, for me.
~ Abby Elliott
I would say just start writing. You've got to write every day. Copy someone that you like if you think that perhaps could become your sound, too. I did that with Hemingway, and I thought I was writing just like Hemingway. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me - he didn't have a sense of humor. I don't know anything he's written that's funny.
~ Elmore Leonard
I don't think I'm that good a singer. I can't think of a song that I've written that I don't like the way somebody else sings it better.
~ Kris Kristofferson
I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.
~ Tom Stoppard