"I only wrote one song in jail. But I'm writing new album - you're going to feel the entire 11 months of what I went through on this album. I'm venting my anger."
Read quote
3 likes
Writing quotes
Writing
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Writing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Writing quotes (page 308 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"It's been a fascinating thing because we didn't really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It's been like, we've just sort of grown up a bit and it's amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works."
Read quote
3 likes
"No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'"
Read quote
3 likes
"Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche."
Read quote
3 likes
"The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects."
Read quote
3 likes
"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage."
Read quote
3 likes
"The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me."
Read quote
3 likes
"You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way."
Read quote
3 likes
"You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it."
Read quote
3 likes
"I'm trying to learn how to write faster."
Read quote
3 likes
"There's only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs. It's not that I didn't do anything during the time when I wrote no songs. I was creative, but in another way. I had ideas for songs and collected the ideas."
Read quote
3 likes
"If you use the original World Wide Web program, you never see a URL or have to deal with HTML. That was a surprise to me - that people were prepared to painstakingly write HTML."
Read quote
3 likes
"Since I cant write the greatest American novel, Im going to write the longest American novel."
Read quote
3 likes
"I started writing serious books so late because I knew Id be accused of riding on my fathers coattails."
Read quote
3 likes
"I like writing, but I write for self-improvement more than I do for money."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I'm writing a lyric, I totally forget about the music. I'm just looking at the lyric and thinking about it almost as a separate entity. And then I'll go to my keyboard with all the lyrics printed out and try to think of how to make this a complete musical thing. I've got a very basic keyboard with some presets."
Read quote
3 likes
"Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home."
Read quote
3 likes
"Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot."
Read quote
3 likes
"The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary."
Read quote
3 likes