Alimony is the curse of the writing class.
Norman Mailer

While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.
Marilyn vos Savant

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle

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

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.
Ken Kesey

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
Henri Frederic Amiel

I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I just started writing songs. After two songs I just continued to explore it.
Neil Young

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Nora Ephron

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
Ralph Ellison

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison

The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
Bill Watterson

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
Ross Perot

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
Agatha Christie

I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.
Patton Oswalt

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

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
Jules Renard

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Alain de Botton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.
Bell Hooks