[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true.... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be... the severest critics of our own societies.
- Edward Abbey
When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier. It helps, naturally, to have something to say.
- Edward Abbey
But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.
- Edward Abbey
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
- Edward Abbey
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain
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.
- Mark Twain
It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense
- Mark Twain
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
- Mark Twain
I want to write a best-selling book.
- Diane Abbott
I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.
- Floyd Abrams
...Let me say that I do think decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly, there's no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
- Chinua Achebe
I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.
- Kathy Acker
There's a saying, 'It's easy to write songs, but very difficult to write great songs.' I'm going through that right now.
- Bryan Adams
Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.
- Franklin Pierce Adams
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
- Robert Adamson
After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
- George Ade
I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing.
- Naima Adedapo
I wouldn't be able to write a song like 'Someone Like You' and get someone else to sing it because it's so personal. It's like giving away your heart.
- Adele
I doubt I'll be singing forever, because at some point people aren't going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I'll still get the opportunity to write songs.
- Adele
If I am constantly working, my relationships fail. So at least now I can have enough time to write a happy record. And be in love and be happy. And then I don't know what I'll do. Get married. Have some kids. Plant a nice vegetable patch.
- Adele
The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.
- Lee Child
I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time.
- Lee Child
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
- Kate Adie
This concept could easily have gone awry. Stories about love tend to go that way sometimes. They wander into the realm of cheese and never return, which I think is a shame, because there is a way to write about romantic love without breaking out the Velveeta.
- Veronica Roth
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.
- Mitch Albom
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
- Jack Lemmon
It took me 40 years to write my first book.
- Paulo Coelho
No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
- Paulo Coelho
I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won't survive.
- Paulo Coelho
One day, I am going to write a travel guide containing only maps and addresses of hotels, and with the rest of the pages blank. That way, people will have to make their own initery, to discover themselves restaurants, monuments and all the magnificent things that every city has, but which are never mentioned because ' the history we have been taught' does not include them in the list of things you must see.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.
- Jodi Picoult
I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.
- Jodi Picoult
I started writing when I had three kids under the age of 4. I used to write every ten minutes I got to sit in front of a computer. Now, when I have more time, I function the same way: if it's writing time, I write.
- Jodi Picoult
It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
- Jodi Picoult
I'm always writing, even when I'm not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids' hands, too, but they don't let me any more. When I'm driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms.
- Jodi Picoult
I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.
- Jodi Picoult
I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.
- Jodi Picoult
Stupid English."
"English isn't stupid," I say.
"Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me."
"Why not?"
"He says lunch isn't a subject."
I glance at him. "It isn't."
"Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?
- Jodi Picoult
I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
- Sherman Alexie
To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.
- Hannes Alfven
...if I were to ever have enough material or the philosophical mind to write a book about what a good life ought to be, my thesis would be simply this: A good life is one that has managed to turn anxiety into hope, and fear into success. And that is what I call total virtue.
- Mohammed Naseehu Ali
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
- Paul Valery
But you hate poetry!
Yes, but you make me want to write it.
- Cassandra Clare
And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.
- Cassandra Clare
Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?
- Elizabeth Gilbert
The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen." She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event "that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
(paraphrased from Tim Powers) My style might seem awkward, but I'm only trying to write down the things in the scene that I think the reader should know.
- Ernest Hemingway
In order to write about life first you must live it.
- Ernest Hemingway
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
- Ernest Hemingway
Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
- Ernest Hemingway
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
- Ernest Hemingway
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
- Ernest Hemingway
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
- Ernest Hemingway
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
- Ernest Hemingway
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
- Ernest Hemingway
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
- Ernest Hemingway
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
- Ernest Hemingway
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
- Ernest Hemingway
He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.
- Ernest Hemingway
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
- Ernest Hemingway
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
- Ernest Hemingway
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
- Ernest Hemingway
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
- Ernest Hemingway
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
- Ernest Hemingway
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
- Fred Allen
To be taught to readwhat is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speakbut what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to thinknay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
- John Ruskin
To be taught to write or to speak but what is the use of speaking if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
- John Ruskin
Here's what the death knell for the personal computer will sound like: Mainly I use my phone/paid, but I still use my PC to write long e-mails and documents. Most people aren't there yet, but that's where we're headed
- Paul Allen
When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.
- Margery Allingham
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.
- Dorothy Allison
I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.
- Dorothy Allison
There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.
- Gregg Allman
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
- Stephen Colbert
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
- Nicole Krauss
These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.
- Nicole Krauss
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
- Nicole Krauss
A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.
- Nicole Krauss
That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
- Nicole Krauss
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
- Steve Almond
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
- Martin Amis
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
- Martin Amis
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
- Laurie Anderson
We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.
- Kevin J Anderson
So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.
- Paul Thomas Anderson
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
- Robert Anderson
I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.
- Wes Anderson
I do shodo magic," Dali said. "I curse through calligraphy. I have to write the curse out on a piece of paper and I can't move while I do it. One smudge, and I might kill the lot of us."
Oh good.
"But don't worry." Dali waved her arms. "It's so precise, it usually doesn't work at all."
Better and better.
- Ilona Andrews
I don't know why sportswriters always have to write bad things about Joaquin Andujar.
- Joaquin Andujar
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
- Maya Angelou
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
- Maya Angelou
I don't think you ever stop giving. I really don't. I think it's an on-going process. And it's not just about being able to write a check. It's being able to touch somebody's life.
- Oprah Winfrey
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
- Piers Anthony
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
- David Antin
His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.
- Mary Antin
I'm the guy who gets uncomfortable. That's why I was able to write 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up.' I believe in those guys.
- Judd Apatow
I only write when I'm angry or sad, so because that's when I just have to write... If I'm having a good time and I'm happy and things are going really well, why would I want to stop what I'm doing to go and write at the piano?
- Fiona Apple
I wanted to write a happy song. I didn't know how.
- Fiona Apple
Any room where you feel a good vibe is a good place to write.
- Nicole Appleton
I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.
- Sergio Aragones
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
- Jeffrey Archer
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
- Mary Archer
Are you a lefty?" he asked with amiable interest.
"No. But if this hand gets bitten off, I'll still have my good one to write with.
- Lisa Kleypas
Shaw...has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.
- Lisa Kleypas
To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.
- Aristotle
I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.
- Ayi Kwei Armah
It's a very organic process, and it has a specific order to it. I love to write, and once you've written, then you arrange. After the arrangement, you record it, and then you tour it.
- Joan Armatrading
The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces.
- Peter Arnett
And then we've got Blades of Glory, and we've got Brothers Solomon, and I've got a script in development with this guy Chuck Martin who used to write on Arrested, and, you know, we have a few things in various stages of development.
- Will Arnett
What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
- Antonin Artaud
The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write.
- Roger Ascham
If you're angry, you don't have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead...write one. I know you're at least a little bit angry with me.
And when you're done with your poem, decipher it as if you'd just found it printed in a textbook and know absolutely nothing about its author. The results can be amazing...and scary. But it's always cheaper than a therapist.
- Jay Asher
I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
- Jane Asher
I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show.
- Matthew Ashford
As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.
- Julian Assange
Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
- Margaret Atwood
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
- David Herbert Lawrence
It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Although you be, as I am, one of those
Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose,
For poetry is magic: born in sin, you
May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.
- W H Auden
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
- W H Auden
You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
- Jean M Auel
Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.
- Jean M Auel
To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
- Erich Auerbach
And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.
- Jane Austen
I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
- Jane Austen
Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Cousins Wife.
Moses must have forgotten to write that one down
- Julia Quinn
Happy endings are all I can do. I wouldn't know how to write anything else.
- Julia Quinn
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
- Paul Auster
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
- Paul Auster
That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into the
bargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It had
never felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of struggling
to write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that he
didn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, he
couldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing it
anymore.
- Paul Auster
I love to write and to get to know the people who are listening.
- Emilie Autumn
I don't write for a living. I live to write.
- Marwa Ayad
We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about moneya subject in which they still have zero practical experience.
- Chris Ayres
Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
- David Bengurion
The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.
- Richard Bach
Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.
- Burt Bacharach
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book and that he did not learn it better.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter.
- Paul Bailey
I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.
- Rita Rudner
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
- David Baker
But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
- David Baldacci
Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.
- David Baldacci
I'm ever curious about the world. I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about. Having a vivid imagination is also a plus.
- David Baldacci
I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.
- David Baldacci
The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.
- David Baldacci
You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.
- James Baldwin
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr Erskine.
- Oscar Wilde
The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.
- Lester Bangs
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
- Russell Banks
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
- Russell Banks
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
- John Banville
To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato -- for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius -- without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.
- Muriel Barbery
We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs.
- Travis Barker
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair... which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
- Natalie Clifford Barney
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
- James M Barrie
It is very well to be able to write a book, but can you waggle your ears?
- James M Barrie
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.
- Lewis Carroll
I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!
- Lewis Carroll
I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
- Lynda Barry
My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.
- Lynda Barry
I used to write things out beforehand. But sometimes it backfires.
- Todd Barry
Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.
- John Barth
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
- Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
- Roland Barthes
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
- John Barton
The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
- John Barton
You lose your anonymity just like a helium balloon with a string. Therefore people are going to have their own opinion and they're going to write in whatever clever manner they desire.
- Kim Basinger
I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.
- Lance Bass
To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.
- Augusto Roa Bastos
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
- Mario Batali
Why did you write "Charlie Brown is a blockhead" on the sidewalk?"
"Because I sincerely believe you are a blockhead! I have to write what I believe is true... It's my moral respolsibility!"
"Deep down I admire her integrity..
- Charles M Schulz
I just don't know how to write a love letter. What can you say to a girl that shows you really like her?"
"How about, enclosed please find a cookie?
- Charles M Schulz
But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
- Samuel Beckett
I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937
- Samuel Beckett
I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.
- Gerry Beckley
What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.
- Brendan Francis
I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.
- Adrian Belew
Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
- Marvin Bell
Make them do as you want them to," she said.
"I can't," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.
- L M Montgomery
Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing--would you?'
'Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I have to write--I can't help it at times--I've just got to.
- L M Montgomery
Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth
- L M Montgomery
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
- Saul Bellow
I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.
- John Steinbeck
When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
- John Steinbeck
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.
- Herman Wouk
I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.
- Dirk Benedict
...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
- Alan Bennett
Well, we promised our fans that we'd put out records faster, and that's what we're doing. We figured out a way to condense our cycle, so to speak, by... continuing to write, trying to keep the creative ball rolling as often as possible.
- Chester Bennington
Life is a sweeter, stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be near or far. If the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away he is still thee to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to shar life and experience with, to serve, to honor, to admire, to love.
- A C Benson
Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
- Haruki Murakami
It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
- Haruki Murakami
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
- Haruki Murakami
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
- Haruki Murakami
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
- Haruki Murakami
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
- Haruki Murakami
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
- Haruki Murakami
- Edward Abbey
When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier. It helps, naturally, to have something to say.
- Edward Abbey
But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.
- Edward Abbey
But it is a writer's duty to write and speak and record the truth, always the truth, no matter whom may be offended.
- Edward Abbey
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
- Mark Twain
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.
- Mark Twain
It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense
- Mark Twain
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
- Mark Twain
I want to write a best-selling book.
- Diane Abbott
I really did try to write it so that an educated public that cares about issues like this doesn't have to be a lawyer and can read it and understand it.
- Floyd Abrams
...Let me say that I do think decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly, there's no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
- Chinua Achebe
I might be writing what people expect me to write, writing from that place where I might be ruled by economic considerations. To overcome that, I started working with my dreams, because I'm not so censored when I use dream material.
- Kathy Acker
There's a saying, 'It's easy to write songs, but very difficult to write great songs.' I'm going through that right now.
- Bryan Adams
Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.
- Franklin Pierce Adams
Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
- Robert Adamson
After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
- George Ade
I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing.
- Naima Adedapo
I wouldn't be able to write a song like 'Someone Like You' and get someone else to sing it because it's so personal. It's like giving away your heart.
- Adele
I doubt I'll be singing forever, because at some point people aren't going to want to hear my music, and I hope that I'll still get the opportunity to write songs.
- Adele
If I am constantly working, my relationships fail. So at least now I can have enough time to write a happy record. And be in love and be happy. And then I don't know what I'll do. Get married. Have some kids. Plant a nice vegetable patch.
- Adele
The way to write a thriller is to ask a question at the beginning, and answer it at the end.
- Lee Child
I need a stimulating environment to write because my books are driven at 100 miles per hour at a time.
- Lee Child
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
- Kate Adie
This concept could easily have gone awry. Stories about love tend to go that way sometimes. They wander into the realm of cheese and never return, which I think is a shame, because there is a way to write about romantic love without breaking out the Velveeta.
- Veronica Roth
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader.
- Mitch Albom
It's hard enough to write a good drama, it's much harder to write a good comedy, and it's hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
- Jack Lemmon
It took me 40 years to write my first book.
- Paulo Coelho
No one can learn to love by following a manual and no one can learn to write by following a course. I'm not telling you to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.
- Paulo Coelho
I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won't survive.
- Paulo Coelho
One day, I am going to write a travel guide containing only maps and addresses of hotels, and with the rest of the pages blank. That way, people will have to make their own initery, to discover themselves restaurants, monuments and all the magnificent things that every city has, but which are never mentioned because ' the history we have been taught' does not include them in the list of things you must see.
- Paulo Coelho
Do not concern yourself with what you know or what you do not know. Do not think about the past or the future, merely allow God's hands to write the surprises of the present on each new day.
- Paulo Coelho
Writing is total grunt work. A lot of people think it's all about sitting and waiting for the muse. I don't buy that. It's a job. There are days when I really want to write, days when I don't. Every day I sit down and write.
- Jodi Picoult
I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.
- Jodi Picoult
I started writing when I had three kids under the age of 4. I used to write every ten minutes I got to sit in front of a computer. Now, when I have more time, I function the same way: if it's writing time, I write.
- Jodi Picoult
It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
- Jodi Picoult
I'm always writing, even when I'm not at my desk. I write on my hands. I used to write on my kids' hands, too, but they don't let me any more. When I'm driving I sometimes write all the way up my arms.
- Jodi Picoult
I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.
- Jodi Picoult
I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.
- Jodi Picoult
Stupid English."
"English isn't stupid," I say.
"Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me."
"Why not?"
"He says lunch isn't a subject."
I glance at him. "It isn't."
"Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that?
- Jodi Picoult
I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
- Sherman Alexie
To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.
- Hannes Alfven
...if I were to ever have enough material or the philosophical mind to write a book about what a good life ought to be, my thesis would be simply this: A good life is one that has managed to turn anxiety into hope, and fear into success. And that is what I call total virtue.
- Mohammed Naseehu Ali
To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.
- Paul Valery
But you hate poetry!
Yes, but you make me want to write it.
- Cassandra Clare
And write what you love - don't feel pressured to write serious prose if what you like is to be funny.
- Cassandra Clare
Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?
- Elizabeth Gilbert
The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Wanting to get married, for me, is all about a desire to feel chosen." She went on to write that while the concept of building a life together with another adult was appealing, what really pulled at her heart was the desire for a wedding, a public event "that will unequivocally prove to everyone, especially to myself, that I am precious enough to have been selected by somebody forever.
- Elizabeth Gilbert
(paraphrased from Tim Powers) My style might seem awkward, but I'm only trying to write down the things in the scene that I think the reader should know.
- Ernest Hemingway
In order to write about life first you must live it.
- Ernest Hemingway
There is nothing you can do except try to write it the way that it was. So you must write each day better than you possibly can and use the sorrow that you have now to make you know how the early sorrow came. And you must always remember the things you believed because if you know them they will be there in the writing and you won't betray them. The writing is the only progress you make.
- Ernest Hemingway
Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
- Ernest Hemingway
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
- Ernest Hemingway
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
- Ernest Hemingway
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
- Ernest Hemingway
I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.
- Ernest Hemingway
It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.
- Ernest Hemingway
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.
- Ernest Hemingway
it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.
- Ernest Hemingway
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
- Ernest Hemingway
He wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in a painting. You have to do it from inside yourself... You could do it if you wanted to fight for it. If you'd lived right with your eyes.
- Ernest Hemingway
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
- Ernest Hemingway
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
- Ernest Hemingway
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced..
- Ernest Hemingway
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
- Ernest Hemingway
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
- Ernest Hemingway
I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
- Fred Allen
To be taught to readwhat is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speakbut what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to thinknay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
- John Ruskin
To be taught to write or to speak but what is the use of speaking if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.
- John Ruskin
Here's what the death knell for the personal computer will sound like: Mainly I use my phone/paid, but I still use my PC to write long e-mails and documents. Most people aren't there yet, but that's where we're headed
- Paul Allen
When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.
- Margery Allingham
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.
- Dorothy Allison
I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.
- Dorothy Allison
There are as many ways to write songs as there are songs.
- Gregg Allman
I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.
- Stephen Colbert
When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.
- Nicole Krauss
These things are lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone taking the time to write it all down. That Litvinoff had a wife who was so devoted is, to be frank, the only reason anyone knows anything about him at all.
- Nicole Krauss
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.
- Nicole Krauss
A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.
- Nicole Krauss
That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
- Nicole Krauss
Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.
- Steve Almond
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.
- Martin Amis
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
- Martin Amis
My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
- Laurie Anderson
We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.
- Kevin J Anderson
So with 'There Will Be Blood,' I didn't even really feel like I was adapting a book. I was just desperate to find stuff to write.
- Paul Thomas Anderson
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
- Robert Anderson
I have a way of filming things and staging them and designing sets. There were times when I thought I should change my approach, but in fact, this is what I like to do. It's sort of like my handwriting as a movie director. And somewhere along the way, I think I've made the decision: I'm going to write in my own handwriting.
- Wes Anderson
I do shodo magic," Dali said. "I curse through calligraphy. I have to write the curse out on a piece of paper and I can't move while I do it. One smudge, and I might kill the lot of us."
Oh good.
"But don't worry." Dali waved her arms. "It's so precise, it usually doesn't work at all."
Better and better.
- Ilona Andrews
I don't know why sportswriters always have to write bad things about Joaquin Andujar.
- Joaquin Andujar
The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.
- Maya Angelou
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
- Maya Angelou
I don't think you ever stop giving. I really don't. I think it's an on-going process. And it's not just about being able to write a check. It's being able to touch somebody's life.
- Oprah Winfrey
It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it.
- Piers Anthony
I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
- David Antin
His struggle for a bare living left him no time to take advantage of the public evening school. In time he learned to read, to follow a conversation or lecture; but he never learned to write correctly; and his pronunciation remains extremely foreign to this day.
- Mary Antin
I'm the guy who gets uncomfortable. That's why I was able to write 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin' and 'Knocked Up.' I believe in those guys.
- Judd Apatow
I only write when I'm angry or sad, so because that's when I just have to write... If I'm having a good time and I'm happy and things are going really well, why would I want to stop what I'm doing to go and write at the piano?
- Fiona Apple
I wanted to write a happy song. I didn't know how.
- Fiona Apple
Any room where you feel a good vibe is a good place to write.
- Nicole Appleton
I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it.
- Sergio Aragones
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
- Jeffrey Archer
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
- Mary Archer
Are you a lefty?" he asked with amiable interest.
"No. But if this hand gets bitten off, I'll still have my good one to write with.
- Lisa Kleypas
Shaw...has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.
- Lisa Kleypas
To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.
- Aristotle
I did point out that I have no prophetic gifts. I write books because I tried to do something more useful and failed. Since I've been trained to write, I do that as a defense against total despair. And seeing people like you, who are actively engaged in trying to salvage pieces of our wrecked lives, gives me hope that after all we are not alone.
- Ayi Kwei Armah
It's a very organic process, and it has a specific order to it. I love to write, and once you've written, then you arrange. After the arrangement, you record it, and then you tour it.
- Joan Armatrading
The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan. Clearly, the American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces.
- Peter Arnett
And then we've got Blades of Glory, and we've got Brothers Solomon, and I've got a script in development with this guy Chuck Martin who used to write on Arrested, and, you know, we have a few things in various stages of development.
- Will Arnett
What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.
- Elizabeth Von Arnim
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
- Antonin Artaud
The least learned, for the most part, have been always most ready to write.
- Roger Ascham
If you're angry, you don't have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead...write one. I know you're at least a little bit angry with me.
And when you're done with your poem, decipher it as if you'd just found it printed in a textbook and know absolutely nothing about its author. The results can be amazing...and scary. But it's always cheaper than a therapist.
- Jay Asher
I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
- Jane Asher
I don't know if Jim was a major part of that or not. He is one of a small group of real storytellers. He has enormous imagination and ability to write. I'm glad he's coming back. It's going to be good for the show.
- Matthew Ashford
As we have seen, WikiLeaks is a robust organization. During my time in solitary confinement in the basement of a Victorian prison, we continue to release, our media partners continued to write stories. The important revelations from this material continue to come out. We have approximately 2,000 cables into 250,000.
- Julian Assange
Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
- Margaret Atwood
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
- David Herbert Lawrence
It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.
- Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Although you be, as I am, one of those
Who feel a Christian ought to write in prose,
For poetry is magic: born in sin, you
May read it to exorcies the Gentile in you.
- W H Auden
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
- W H Auden
You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
- Jean M Auel
Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.
- Jean M Auel
To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.
- Erich Auerbach
And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.
- Jane Austen
I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.
- Jane Austen
Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Cousins Wife.
Moses must have forgotten to write that one down
- Julia Quinn
Happy endings are all I can do. I wouldn't know how to write anything else.
- Julia Quinn
As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms. To what end? To be free. But free to what end? To read books, to write books, to think.
- Paul Auster
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
- Paul Auster
That was all he had ever aspired to, with a wife thrown into the
bargain, maybe, and a kid or two to go along with her. It had
never felt like too much to ask for, but after three years of struggling
to write his dissertation, Tom finally understood that he
didn't have it in him to finish. Or, if he did have it in him, he
couldn't persuade himself to believe in the value of doing it
anymore.
- Paul Auster
I love to write and to get to know the people who are listening.
- Emilie Autumn
I don't write for a living. I live to write.
- Marwa Ayad
We had all opted to take City's financial reporting course work, which, in theory, meant we wanted to write about stock prices and corporate takeovers. That, of course, was a joke. No one still in their twenties, and broke, goes into journalism to write about moneya subject in which they still have zero practical experience.
- Chris Ayres
Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
- David Bengurion
The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, though you may express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write lies, or nonsense, or to tear the pages.
- Richard Bach
Never be ashamed to write a melody that people remember.
- Burt Bacharach
It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book and that he did not learn it better.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
For truth to tell, dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with pen- that one must learn how to write
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter.
- Paul Bailey
I love to write jokes and that's all I think about.
- Rita Rudner
What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
- David Baker
But if I worried too much about publishers' expectations, I'd probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.
- David Baldacci
Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.
- David Baldacci
I'm ever curious about the world. I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about. Having a vivid imagination is also a plus.
- David Baldacci
I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.
- David Baldacci
The military is a very cool world to write about. I went down to Ft. Benning, Ga., for military training, and I learned a lot about soldiers and officers and why they joined up and what their life has been like.
- David Baldacci
You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.
- James Baldwin
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr Erskine.
- Oscar Wilde
The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.
- Lester Bangs
And out of a desire essentially to imitate what I was reading, I began to write, like a clever monkey.
- Russell Banks
And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.
- Russell Banks
In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.
- John Banville
To write entire pages of dazzling prose about a tomato -- for Pierre Arthens reviews food as if he were telling a story, and that alone is enough to make him a genius -- without ever seeing or holding the tomato is a troubling display of virtuosity.
- Muriel Barbery
We just wanted to write a bunch of songs that we thought were good songs.
- Travis Barker
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair... which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
- Natalie Clifford Barney
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
- James M Barrie
It is very well to be able to write a book, but can you waggle your ears?
- James M Barrie
Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.
- Lewis Carroll
I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!
- Lewis Carroll
I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?
- Lynda Barry
My goal on my bucket list is to write a romantic comedy movie.
- Lynda Barry
I used to write things out beforehand. But sometimes it backfires.
- Todd Barry
Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.
- John Barth
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.
- Roland Barthes
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
- Roland Barthes
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
- John Barton
The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
- John Barton
You lose your anonymity just like a helium balloon with a string. Therefore people are going to have their own opinion and they're going to write in whatever clever manner they desire.
- Kim Basinger
I've been asked too many times to write a book by the fans.
- Lance Bass
To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.
- Augusto Roa Bastos
When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.
- Mario Batali
Why did you write "Charlie Brown is a blockhead" on the sidewalk?"
"Because I sincerely believe you are a blockhead! I have to write what I believe is true... It's my moral respolsibility!"
"Deep down I admire her integrity..
- Charles M Schulz
I just don't know how to write a love letter. What can you say to a girl that shows you really like her?"
"How about, enclosed please find a cookie?
- Charles M Schulz
But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understand it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report. Does this mean I am freer now than I was? I do not know. I shall learn. Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.
- Samuel Beckett
I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937
- Samuel Beckett
I think if you're writing from the heart, very often, the subject matter will adjust as you age... but you try to write the best song you can possibly write. For us, we have the same basic elements that make up the America sound.
- Gerry Beckley
What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.
- Brendan Francis
I borrowed a guitar at age 16 and taught myself to play because I wanted to write songs.
- Adrian Belew
Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.
- Marvin Bell
Make them do as you want them to," she said.
"I can't," mourned Anne. "Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.
- L M Montgomery
Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing--would you?'
'Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I have to write--I can't help it at times--I've just got to.
- L M Montgomery
Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth
- L M Montgomery
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
- Saul Bellow
I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im.
- John Steinbeck
When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
- John Steinbeck
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.
- Herman Wouk
I write from the same place I parent, and since becoming a single parent, I have found it difficult, if not impossible, to write anything of length.
- Dirk Benedict
...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
- Alan Bennett
Well, we promised our fans that we'd put out records faster, and that's what we're doing. We figured out a way to condense our cycle, so to speak, by... continuing to write, trying to keep the creative ball rolling as often as possible.
- Chester Bennington
Life is a sweeter, stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be near or far. If the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away he is still thee to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to shar life and experience with, to serve, to honor, to admire, to love.
- A C Benson
Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.
- Haruki Murakami
It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.
- Haruki Murakami
In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.
- Haruki Murakami
I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.
- Haruki Murakami
A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me awake and shout, 'Hey,this is no time for sleeping! You can't forget me, there's still more to write!' Impelled by that voice, I would find myself writing a novel. In this sense, too, my short stories and novels connect inside me in a very natural, organic way.
- Haruki Murakami
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
- Haruki Murakami
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
- Haruki Murakami
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