Writing quotes

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness
Georges Simenon

Television has raised writing to a new low.
Samuel Goldwyn

Songwriting is one of those strange arts whereby you can have no inspiration for a long time then have a productive period where almost every day a new song is coming to you.
Nanci Griffith

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

I would sweat and think and get it all together. [On lyric writing]
Jim Capaldi

There is something wonderful about singing and writing music, I think there is something special about creativity and the ability humans have in that area.
Kim Gordon

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer

I began writing after my child was seriously hurt in a day care center accident, and I wanted to come home to be with her during her recovery.
Leslie Banks

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.
Katherine Mansfield

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing; for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber

Writing is something that can be notoriously difficult to do, so when you get the idea you want to make the most of it.
Gordon Getty

Writing something in the spirit of Halloween is like Mother Teresa writing on charity and sacrifice!
Danny Elfman

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
Hilaire Belloc

Writing can do without television - that infidious media seeps into all other areas of our lives as it is.
Hugo Gernsback

I'm pretty social so it's hard for me to find solitude, but I need to have solitude to write. [On the difficulties of writing - not writers block but loneliness]
Catie Curtis

I am a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan

Generally the people out on the pitch are the ones who know how to play the game, not the people who are writing about it.
Marcus Trescothick

I'm supposed to be taking time off. But I'm still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.
Joss Stone

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
T S Eliot

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.
Dame Edith Sitwell

Shake[speare] was a dramatist of note; He lived by writing things to quote.
H C Bunner

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
John Dalton

Providing a voice for those who may be in a similar situation, who might need that voice is so important. They might not be able to find that in themselves, to get themselves out of that situation and make something positive out of it. Whenever I'm writing a song that's what I'm doing - making a negative a positive and healing myself in the process. [Elle UK March 2004]
Christina Aguilera

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
Kenneth Tynan

People seem to be writing off England and that's a dangerous thing to do.

They have a lot of very good players and just because they haven't been going well over the last year and a bit, it doesn't mean they can't win anymore!
Andrew Mehrtens

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
Tennessee Williams

The hardest part is developing the idea, and that can take years. [on writing a novel]
Eric Carle

I don't think there's much point in bemoaning the state of the world unless there's some way you can think of to improve it. Otherwise, don't bother writing a book - go and find a tropical island and lie in the sun.
Peter Singer

Beauty can't amuse you, but brainwork - reading, writing, thinking - can.
Christian Nestell Bovee

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else.
Ivern Ball

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.
Rebecca West

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Even now a team of linguists is at work translating Don Revie's writings on the game [of football] from the original gibberish into Arabic.
Michael Parkinson

It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on.
Jack Kerouac

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings.
Boris Pasternak

When you start writing the magic comes when the characters seem to take on a life of their own and write the words for themselves.
Alice Hoffman

Musically I wanted to explore my songwriting, branching out into my music. I’ve been playing blues since I started, and I wanted to go in more of a soul, R&B direction.
Jonny Lang

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

Writing a book need not be an intimidating feeling, but rather it can be liberating, fulfilling and above all immensely personally satisfying.
Gerald Griffin

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Anais Nin

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker

The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.
Norman Mailer

Writing songs is super intimate. It's a bit like getting naked.
Gwen Stefani

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.
Laurence Sterne

We never let go. Ever. Even with punctuation. It's frightening. I can't see anyone from any record company ever writing an email to Neil and not getting it back, with corrections.
Chris Lowe

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
Truman Capote

Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.
Bette Midler

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

In my writing I am acting as a map-maker, an explorer of psychic areas... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
William Borroughs

I really want to get into writing film music. I'm really passionate about that.
Vanessa Brown

Pick another category

Writing Quotes

Quotes & Authors

Puzzles & More