Quotes about writing
writing successful whole-life
By then The Kite Runner had become quite successful and I found myself in a position that I had always dreamed of my whole life, which was to write for a living. Khaled Hosseini
writing choices waiting
All stories I write are compulsive. Anything I've ever written was because I don't have a choice. I write stories because I can't wait to tell it, I can't wait to see how it ends.
writing night genre-is
I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.
writing rights stories
I am co-writing a screenplay now and I'm working on the rights to another story I want to do. So I plan to produce and direct. So, for me, I don't really feel that I am vulnerable to that sad baggage that comes with the business of filmmaking. Kerry Washington
writing people choices
When you leave here today and commence the next stage of your life, you can follow someone else's script, try to make choices that will make other people happy, avoid discomfort, do what is expected, and copy the status quo. Or you can look at all that you have accomplished today and use it as fuel to venture forth and write your own story. If you do, amazing things will take shape.
writing entertaining my-friends
Everything I write is based on something I've personally experienced, or things that my friends have experienced that I just find horribly entertaining. Kesha
writing ideas caught
I still haven't quite caught on to the idea of writing without dialogue. I like writing dialogue, and there's nothing wrong with dialogue in movies. Kenneth Lonergan
writing boys men
And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table? Jonathan Safran Foer
writing ideas important
The hardest part of writing is not to get the ideas but to remember, why it is important to get them.
writing self editing
The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.
writing grandfather would-be
Only a few months into our marriage," writes the grandfather, "we started marking off areas in the apartment as 'Nothing Places,' in which one could be assured of complete privacy, we agreed that we never would look at the marked-off zones, that they would be nonexistent territories in the apartment in which one could temporarily cease to exist.
writing dark light
Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.
writing boots letters
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
writing ideas despair
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down. Hector Berlioz
writing long needs
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. Henry David Thoreau
writing heat great-writing
Write while the heat is in you.
writing thinking mind
When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.
writing achievement done
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
writing use-it-or-lose-it legs
Writing is the only profession where nobody considers you ridiculous if you earn no money. Money is like an arm or a leg; use it or lose it. Henry Ford
writing airplane
I write a lot on airplanes actually because it's completely isolating; there's no one to talk to, there's nothing to do. Mandy Moore
writing italian years
I came out here to do the acting, and then after a year of auditions and not getting anything, I met these Italian guys and they asked me to write lyrics for them. Then they said, "Why don't you just front the band?" I said, "Well, maybe because I can't sing. I've never sang before in my life." Malin Akerman
writing thinking people
Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone. Malcolm Gladwell
writing men tables
A labourer cannot sit at the table and write, but a man who has worked at the table all his life can certainly take to physical labour. Mahatma Gandhi
writing answers vehement
Vehement writing, even if it is charged with truth, is no answer to violent action.
writing men idols
The universal object and idol of men of letters is reputation. John Adams
writing views giving
From where I sit, battles are hard. I've written my share. Sometimes I employ the private's viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That's vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general's point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction. George R. R. Martin
writing successful thoughtful
All fiction, if it's successful, is going to appeal to the emotions. Emotion is really what fiction is all about. That's not to say fiction can't be thoughtful, or present some interesting or provocative ideas to make us think. But if you want to present an intellectual argument, nonfiction is a better tool. You can drive a nail with a shoe but a hammer is a better tool for that. But fiction is about emotional resonance, about making us feel things on a primal and visceral level.
writing character thinking
I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]
writing thinking agony
I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?
writing impact advice
The best writing advice I had was [in] ‘Heinlein’s Rules for Writers’ by (American science fiction author) Robert A. Heinlein. His first rule is that you must write, and I was already doing that, but his second rule is, ‘You must finish what you write,’ and that had a big impact on me.
writing views knowing
Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.
writing fabulous inspired
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
writing ideas mind
Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it's the execution that is all-important.