Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue."
"I can't define myself as a political writer - I don't think I've earned it, and I don't function as a political writer in the way that many of the writers I admire do. It's not simply a question of context, of where I'm writing from - there is much in American society that urgently needs to be written about. I think your work is always engaged with politics in the looser sense of the word - and that looseness is itself a kind of privilege - because politics and culture are evidently intertwined."
"Facebook is the novel we are all writing"
"Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like."
"I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird."
"In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories."
"It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study."
"I had a strong desire to write and some free time."
"There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature."
"I have three desks. One empty for paperwork, one for the internet and email, and one for the writing computer."
"It's a kind of zen question: if you write a book and no one reads it, is it really a book?"
"But I love to write music. What I would love to do is give some of the songs I write to someone like Taylor Swift because I feel like she could sing them."
"When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art."
"Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind."
"I do not know what I think until I write it."
"When I was writing Dune there was no room in my mind for concerns about the book's success or failure. I was concerned only with the writing. Six years of research had preceded the day I sat down to put the story together, and the interweaving of the many plot layers I had planned required a degree of concentration I had never before experienced."
"I find that if somebody is writing and drawing a comic book, planning it to be a movie and a game at the same time tends to lead to a pretty lame job."
"To begin... To begin... How to start? I'm hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe a banana-nut. That's a good muffin."
"Some sounds are coming from the keyboard and they are very important in the writing process, but on the other hand, we have melody and we have the song before, so if the keyboard sound fits very well, it takes its artistic direction. We play the machines and the machines play us."
"There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up."
