Quotes About Writing

The hardest part of comedy is writing the jokes, and the second-hardest part is telling the jokes. To me, everything else is significantly easier.

I don't have any writers. I never get a laugh with somebody else's jokes. I can't do it justice.

There is no 'magic water' that you can rub on a script to make the jokes funnier.

What's strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.

the truth is that grammar is always interesting, always useful. Mastering the logic of grammar contributes, in a mysterious way that again evokes some process of osmosis, to the logic of thought.

If we want to write, it makes sense to read—and to read like a writer. If we wanted to grow roses, we would want to visit rose gardens and try to see them the way that a rose gardener would.

There are many occasions in literature in which telling is far more effective than showing.

So it may be that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process.

Every so often I'll hear writers say that there are other writers they would read if for no other reason than to marvel at the skill with which they can put together the sort of sentences that move us to read closely, to disassemble and reassemble them, much the way a mechanic might learn about an engine by taking it apart.

When he wrote a letter, he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a by-matter.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

La lectura hace al hombre completo; la conversación, ágil, y el escribir, preciso".

Cititul îl face pe om deplin, vorbirea îl face prompt, iar scrisul îl face exact.

La lectura hace al hombre completo; la conversación lo hace ágil, el escribir lo hace preciso.

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family.

there's a hormone secreted into the bloodstream of most writers that makes them hate their own work while they are doing it, or immediately after. This, coupled with the chorus of critical reaction from those privileged to take a first look, is almost enough to discourage further work entirely.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.

The notebook was my anchor through all of it.

This book would not have been written had Donald J. Trump not been elected president in November 2016.

Ath a MAN Writeth, So He Speaketh!

I'm told that when Auden died, they found his Oxford all but clawed to pieces. That is the way a poet and his dictionary should come out.

Although the church is more ancient than the Scriptures formally considered (and as to the mode of writing), yet it cannot be called such with respect to the Scriptures materially considered (and as to the substance of the doctrine) because the Word of God is more ancient than the church itself, being its foundation and seed.

El que lo piensa todo primero, no escribe nada después.

Literature is the fragment of fragments', wrote Goethe in Wilhelm Meister's Years of Wandering, the great sad novel of his old age: 'the least part of all that ever happened and was spoken was written down, and of what was written only the least part has survived . . .'.