Writing Quotes

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

~ Edna Ferber

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Writing my novel 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North,' I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943.

~ Richard Flanagan

'Rookie' is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in.

~ Tavi Gevinson

I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on 'Flash,' 'Teen Titans' and 'JSA' for years. I always like diving into characters.

~ Geoff Johns

I think the feeling was that 'Venture Brothers' really has something to sell in terms of a feature. 'Aqua Teen' is an element minute cartoon, and its very subversive and non sequitur and weird. We were writing the one show where we were constantly like, 'God, I wish we had another hour to tell this story.' It seemed like a natural fit.

~ Christopher Mcculloch

When I was a teen, I thought I would have to choose between my writing or my music or my art, but it turns out it's a difficult juggling game but I can do all of them.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

One of my first paid gigs was writing psychology quizzes for 'YM,' a monthly teen magazine like 'Seventeen.'

~ K. A. Applegate

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.

~ Max Brooks

I'm definitely of the 'Harry Potter'-transfigured-me-into-a-reader-and-writer generation. And that's really all I read throughout my teen years, because I really devoted all my time to writing and reading friends' fan-fiction.

~ Adam Silvera

My first break was becoming a staff writer on the rebooted '90210.' And then I got stuck writing in the teen genre for a while.

~ Allison Schroeder

I consider myself a writer. I always wanted to act, and as a teen, I studied acting devotedly. Eventually, I got writing work, but very little acting work.

~ Winnie Holzman

I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now, where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.

~ Tayari Jones

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I'm going to play for the opening sequence.

~ Quentin Tarantino

I would love to continue in music, with writing... but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don't need to be blonde when I'm 60!

~ Taylor Swift

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place. Over the years, I had my heart broken so badly that if I didn't find a way to get all the pain out, I was going to lose my mind. I was crazy! Like, wanting to slash tires and smash car windows. Crazy! I was so hurt that I had to write.

~ Jill Scott

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

~ Tom Stoppard

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

~ Truman Capote

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

~ Truman Capote

I didn't know that there were many rules in music when I first started writing.

~ Tyler Joseph

R&B is the one thing that has influenced every kind of music. Every artist that there is, from those that are sung the most to Adele - you know, she was so influenced by so many R&B artists and soul music - it's clear in her writing that that's where it comes from.

~ Babyface

They told me that they are starting a classic label, and wanted me to be the first artist. So I signed, and am producing myself, and writing my own music, but I'm their first artist on their classic label. And I have creative control.

~ Teena Marie

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

~ Layne Staley

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do, as I'm writing a movie, is go through all those songs, trying to find good songs for fights, or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

~ Quentin Tarantino

I wasn't interested in writing music that wasn't beautiful for me to listen to.

~ Joanna Newsom

I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.

~ Amy Winehouse

One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you're not aware there was a writer there.

~ Stephen Sondheim

I don't feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That's what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.

~ Van Morrison

I've been writing Indian music for a while. Indian music is about Mother Earth, and mine is no exception.

~ Jimmy Carl Black

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

~ Marvin Hamlisch

Although I sometimes enjoy writing from an adult's perspective, I feel dedicated to the coming of age story - that part of a young person's life where he must make a decision that will change his life forever. I still remember what it's like to be twelve years old.

~ Kimberly Willis Holt

We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.

~ Viola Davis

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There's something to be said for writing in the morning. At other points in the day, you're a bit more defensive.

~ Alex Turner

I don't wake up in the morning and say, 'Jeez, I feel great today. I think I'll write a song.' I mean, anything is more interesting to me than writing a song. It's like, 'I think I'd like to write a song... No, I guess I better go feed the cat first.' You know what I mean? It's like pulling teeth. I don't enjoy it a bit.

~ Jerry Garcia

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

~ Italo Calvino

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.

~ Paul Theroux