writing quotes

I like the sound a typewriter makes.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

I don’t do research. I never have.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

I ain’t never far away from a pencil and paper or a tape recorder.

When I was born in 1920, the auto was only 20 years old. Radio didn’t exist. TV didn’t exist. I was born at just the right time to write about all of these things.

I often get ideas for songs on the tour bus at odd times. Like at 6am when no one is around, I’d just write.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

In my later years, I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I’ve worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

I like being a writer.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

Beautiful sentences pop into my head. Beautiful sentences that aren’t always absolutely accurate. Then, I have to choose between the beautiful sentence and being absolutely accurate. It can be a difficult choice.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, ‚No. No, I’m finished. Bye.‘ And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

Writing is fun – at least mostly. I write for four hours every day. After that I go running. As a rule, 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). That’s easy to manage.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.

I’m most suspicious of scripts that have a lot of stage direction at the top of the page… sunrise over the desert and masses of… a whole essay before you get to the dialogue.

The writing is important, but the way you say the line and the pause you give it, the facial expression – all of that is very important.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

All fiction is about people, unless it’s about rabbits pretending to be people. It’s all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that’s what we call ‚the plot‘.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

When I did have some success, it further emboldens you to be like, ‚No, I’m just going to write what I feel I should write.‘

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under other circumstances.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I’m using my own memory, and I’m using my collective memory.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

I don’t know how much longer I’ll be around. I’ll probably be writing when the Lord says, ‚Maya, Maya Angelou, it’s time.‘

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed.

I don’t think I’d ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course, you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place, you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.