Writing Quotes - Page 395

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

Writing is all a lottery -- I have been a loser by the works of the greatest men of the age.

I like to write about women, not so much about the way they relate to men, but about the way they relate to each other.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

I think for a young journalist, it's better to write for the Web at the moment than it is for print

Everyone needs an editor.

I knew Glenn Frey. He called me up in 1977 and told me The Eagles were looking for a bass player, preferably someone who could write and had a high voice. That was me.

The joy I get from winning a major championship doesn't even compare to the feeling I get when a kid writes a letter saying: 'Thank you so much. You have changed my life.'

One of my proudest achievements is that when an authoritative book about Hungarian literature came out about a decade ago, there was a little article about me which said I was a Hungarian writer but pretending not to be. Bearing in mind I can hardly write a cheque in Hungarian, I was delighted to be included in the pantheon of Hungarian writers.

The first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper: paper can be lost or stolen or simply inherited by the wrong people; if you really want to keep something secret, don't write it down.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea - something I've figured out about her that's news and that's worth a reader's time.

The characters you refer to as predatory and unsavory are useful. They're the ones who make a novel into a thriller. They're active, and most of the common virtues, the signs of a good person, are not.

If I don't have a project going, I sit down and begin to write something - a character sketch, a monologue, a description of some sight, or even just a list of ideas.

I had been writing fiction since I was in eighth grade, because I loved it.

For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble; and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.

My best writing has always been in journals.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

We can now say with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past.... The Bible's "Israel" is a literary fiction... Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a "United Monarchy" in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings... The Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people who never existed as such

And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind.

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

Take painsto write a neat round, plain hand, and you will find it a great convenience through life to write a small and compact hand as well as a fair and legible one.

I never before knew the full value of trees. Under them I breakfast, dine, write, read and receive my company.