Writing Quotes

My writing practice taught me the important thing is steadfastness. It's not necessarily discipline. Discipline can become a prison. When your spiritual practices become another thing for you to be anxious about, they've lost their usefulness.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Spiritual, Important, Lost

I was a bartender for a long time, so I know how to make drinks, but I'm more likely to offer them than to have them. I think this is one of the reasons why I get to live longer than my great-grandmother did, and why I get to produce more writing than she did, and why my marriage isn't in dire straits.
Elizabeth Gilbert

Marriage, Time, Live

I used to think I'd like to be a fireman - in fact, I still would - and the only drawback I could see was coming back to the firehouse, after a day of fighting fires, and still having to put in an eight-hour day writing.
David Mamet

After, Fighting, Put

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.
David Mamet

Job, Political, Opinion

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
Edna Ferber

Life, Love, Death

When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Ken Kesey

Lie, Around, Stuff

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
Russell Baker

Work, Real, Writer

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism's problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance.
Russell Baker

Business, Finance, Problems

Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Russell Baker

Important, Friends, Off

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.
Russell Baker

Father, Friend, Thinking

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia Butler

Good, Thinking, Why

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.
Jules Renard

Find, Fashion, Perfect

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.
Dean Koontz

Struggle, Lives, Support

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.
Dean Koontz

Fear, Write, Desire

I'm always aware of writing around things I can't do, and I've come to think that that's actually what 'style' is - an avoidance of your deficiencies.
George Saunders

Around, Actually, Style

Writing is showbusiness for shy people. That's how I see it.
Lee Child

A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage.
Robert McNamara

Advantage, Judgment, Computer

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Knowledge, Science, Soul

Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
V. S. Naipaul

Book, Moment, Whatever

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.
V. S. Naipaul

Business, Reason, Idea

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.
V. S. Naipaul

Woman, Two, Read

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. Naipaul

Talk, Sit, Oppression

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.
V. S. Naipaul

Great, History, Art

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
V. S. Naipaul

Book, Dirty, Grief

Writing has to support itself.
V. S. Naipaul

Hollywood called just as I crested thirty. My novels did not and still do not interest them, but my writing ability did.
Rita Mae Brown

Interest, Ability, Hollywood

I earned two Emmy nominations for writing, and two of the shows I had written were nominated for best in their category.
Rita Mae Brown

Best, Two, Written

I have no idea what will come next in my writing life or life in general. I like not knowing, but I know what I want. That doesn't mean it will happen, but I'll give it my best try.
Rita Mae Brown

Life, Best, Mean

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Harold Pinter

Life, Good, Living

I used to work in kitchens, doing 12 or more hours a day of physical labor, so today, eight to 12 hours of cooking, chatting or filming feels like a vacation. When I have a scheduled 'day off,' I spend several hours writing, then I clean until I crash from fatigue. I don't relax well.
Rachael Ray

Work, Today, Off

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