Writing Quotes - Page 644

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.

You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself.

People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them.

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

Not-writing is a good deal worse than writing.

I write to discover what I know.

I spend three hours a day writing and the rest of my day getting over it.

Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.

If prolific is writing a lot of songs, I'm that. If it's writing a lot of good songs, I'm something else.

Usually it is a painful process (writing), "Superman" came in 45 minutes; "100 Years" in four months.

If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.

We are the authors of our own fate-we write it each day with every one of our actions.

I never pretend to be so superior a being as to be above having and indulging a hobby horse [her journal writing], and while I keep mine within due bounds and limits, nobody, I flatter myself, would wish to deprive me of the poor animal: to be sure, he is not formed for labour, and is rather lame and weak, but then the dear creature is faithful, constant, and loving, and though he sometimes prances, would not kick anyone into the mire, or hurt a single soul for the world--and I would not part with him for one who could win the greatest prize that ever was won at any races.

If you do everything in your power to avoid writing and still can't, then you must be a writer.

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

I am carrying out my plan, so long formulated, of keeping a journal. What I most keenly wish is not to forget that I am writing for myself alone. Thus I shall always tell the truth, I hope, and thus I shall improve myself. These pages will reproach me for my changes of mind.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

Here, beside this great black surface that is my desk, I feel as though I am on a desert island.

I see creative-writing classes as some sort of AA meeting. It is more of a support group for people who write than an actual course in which you learn writing skills. This support group is extremely important because there is something very lonely about writing.

I write what needs to be written the way that seems genuinely right. If what comes out of it are stories, then it is my vocation to believe in them and in the fact that they'll interest people and maybe affect their lives.

I'm not saying that I don't experience people in life as evil, but writing is not a place of alienation; writing is the place where we can try to be human. I think there are some artists whose works are misanthropic. When I see this kind of stuff, I think, they're smart, but I don't need art to tell me people are assholes. I can just go into the streets.

My first and biggest love was always fiction writing. But it is a very lonely pastime.

Acting becomes my real job, writing becomes my second job, and then when I turn 50, I think I'm going to open up an interior decorating company.