All Quotes

Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak - sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
‐‐ Jason Robert Brown

Writing music is just something that I was born to do.
‐‐ Joan Armatrading

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.
‐‐ George Gershwin

Writing music is sort of my hobby, but it's been falling off more and more. Doing comic books takes up my entire life.
‐‐ Bryan Lee O'Malley

Writing music is such a freeing exercise, and it's really nice to play in that world of being confident, vengeful - getting back at all the bad boyfriends.
‐‐ Gin Wigmore

Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
‐‐ Enya

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
‐‐ Harlan Coben

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.
‐‐ Richard Flanagan

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.
‐‐ Natasha Trethewey

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.
‐‐ Richard Ford

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.
‐‐ Aaron Sorkin

Writing never had the immediate gratification I was looking for.
‐‐ Paul Shaffer

Writing nonfiction has been my most serious education, and for all those years it kept me from even glancing in the direction of despair.
‐‐ Marilynne Robinson

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
‐‐ Joan Didion

Writing - not being a writer with interesting habits - gets priority.
‐‐ Jane Lindskold

Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.
‐‐ Adam Mansbach

Writing novels is the most exciting.
‐‐ Sidney Sheldon

Writing novels is where I'm most comfortable. It's a very intimate experience.
‐‐ Matthew Nable

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
‐‐ Anita Brookner

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
‐‐ Stanley Kubrick

Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good.
‐‐ Mercedes Ruehl

Writing old school HTML code was never very much fun but now it's getting downright tedious for most people.
‐‐ Mike Davidson

Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.
‐‐ Chad Harbach

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.
‐‐ P. J. O'Rourke

Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best.
‐‐ Terry Southern

Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.
‐‐ Stewart Stern

Writing on the beach is not what it's cracked up to be. The sand blows, and you perspire, and the page gets all blotty and messed up, so I don't do that anymore.
‐‐ Elmore Leonard

Writing on the blog, you want to get attention and make strong claims. In academic work, that often doesn't pay, so sometimes it's a little bit difficult going back and forth to navigate these differences.
‐‐ Alex Tabarrok

Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.
‐‐ Lincoln Child

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.
‐‐ Paul Di Filippo

Writing only leads to more writing.
‐‐ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Writing, overall, has never been what I'd call fun. It's fulfilling. It doesn't come real easy for me.
‐‐ Iris Dement

Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.
‐‐ Mary Wesley

Writing plays supplied for me everything that painting didn't, which is the ability to tell stories in real time, in a real space, in three dimensions, in flesh and blood. I realized I had been trying to cram all this narrative into my paintings, but ultimately painting was a static medium. So it just opened up this whole new door.
‐‐ Beau Willimon

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.
‐‐ Mary Szybist

Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
‐‐ Edward Hirsch

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.
‐‐ Ishmael Reed

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
‐‐ Helen Dunmore

Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
‐‐ Grace Paley

Writing, producing and directing, I must say, is incredibly satisfying and gratifying. I've never been happier.
‐‐ Jennifer Jason Leigh

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.
‐‐ Jayne Anne Phillips

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.
‐‐ Erin Gruwell

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.
‐‐ Phil Klay

Writing reminds you of how much there is in your life that stands outside your explanations. In that way, it's almost a journey into faith and doubt at once.
‐‐ Pico Iyer

Writing requires a great deal of skill, just like painting does. People don't want to learn those skills.
‐‐ John Milius

Writing requires an intense inner focus, and sometimes you need to express outward, physically or socially.
‐‐ Mary Gaitskill

Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
‐‐ Carlos Fuentes

Writing's a great skill, but thinking's a better one.
‐‐ Meg Rosoff

Writing's all I know. Frankly, I've never been able to do anything else.
‐‐ Christopher Buckley