Writing Quotes - Page 431

I say you ought to write out 10 outrageous goals that are bigger than you because your life isn't meaningful or important unless you're on purpose about something way bigger than you are.

I am trying to get the hang of this new fangled writing machine, but I am not making a shining success of it. However, this is the first attempt I have ever made & yet I perceive I shall soon & easily acquire a fine facility in its use. ... The machine has several virtues. I believe it will print faster than I can write. One may lean back in his chair & work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around. Of course it saves paper.

I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.

I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

It's very hard to write humor.

One suggestion my wife and I have used in our personal finance courses we teach at college is simply writing down all expenditures and seeing where the money goes. That alone will cause heads of households to think twice about x, y or z expenditure, and to consider carefully whether they really need something or not.

If you do all that work of figuring out exactly how writing is done, then it's available to you at anytime, and you can build on it. It's like the difference between shooting one hoop and having it go in by accident and saying later, 'I shot a basket,' - and practicing so much you can do it whenever you want.

And it is a very beautiful idea, and possibly true, that a common man from Stratford with a common education was able to write these plays.

I didn't break into comics to write fairytales or crime comics.

“Et Tu, Babe” was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer’s life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing, it’s my whole life.

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought.

Being a producer is a very different experience than writing my own songs.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

I'm supposed to be writing a book, and I can hardly read.