Writing Quotes

When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.

~ Michael Chabon

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

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

~ Helen Fielding

I've been writing a lot, I've a few projects I'm trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing... Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I'd be thrilled.

~ Paul Michael Glaser

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doctor. I really wanted to be a medical doctor, and I had various schemes: one was to be a psychiatrist, another was tropical medicine.

~ Paul Theroux

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.

~ Tess Gerritsen

Any doctor will admit that any drug can have side effects, and that writing a prescription involves weighing the potential benefits against the risks.

~ Mark Udall

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

~ Wole Soyinka

'Beyond the Lights' took incredible fight to get made. Four years of writing and two years of overcoming 'no.' Every studio balked. Twice. But I kept fighting. What gave me the courage was 'Love & Basketball.' Every studio turned down that film, too. But I never gave up because I believed in it with my whole heart and soul.

~ Gina Prince-Bythewood

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

~ Boutros Boutros-Ghali

What I hope my writing reflects... is a sense of the connections between all human beings... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

~ Chris Crutcher

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.

~ Theodore Sturgeon

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.

~ Peter Carey

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

~ E. B. White

Writing about joyful experiences for just three days can improve people's moods and decrease their visits to health centers a full three months later.

~ Sheryl Sandberg

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

~ Ernest Hemingway

The poem is not, as someone put it, deflective of entry. But the real question is, 'What happens to the reader once he or she gets inside the poem?' That's the real question for me, is getting the reader into the poem and then taking the reader somewhere, because I think of poetry as a kind of form of travel writing.

~ Billy Collins

Interviewing Rei Kawakubo in Tokyo and John Galliano in Paris, both for 'Pop' magazine, were huge for me, not just in learning about fashion and writing but about how little desire I had to be a critic/reporter/journalist/commentator so much as a kind of travel diarist.

~ Tavi Gevinson

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.

~ Michael Dirda

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

~ Pico Iyer

I've always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.

~ Rick Riordan

The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.

~ Robyn Davidson

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

~ Arthur Smith

Novels set in distant places give us expectations not unlike those we have of travel writing, and often the distinctions are blurred, as in, say, the way the low life of Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward is depicted in John David Morley's recent 'Pictures from the Water Trade.'

~ Darryl Pinckney

I want to travel around the country and make my living playing music. I also try to behave in a way that I would appreciate as a music fan. That's how we conduct ourselves, be it in writing music or playing it live.

~ Buzz Osborne

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

~ Tim Cahill

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

~ Darin Strauss

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

~ Richard Russo

Hoping they'd been inspired by the examples of Anne Frank and other teens who had turned negative experiences into something positive by writing about them, I handed out notebooks for my students to journal about their lives. There was some initial resistance. But then the stories poured out of them, full of anger and sadness.

~ Erin Gruwell

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.

~ Mario Benedetti

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

~ Diana Gabaldon

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

~ Akhil Sharma

Some of my favorite movies are action movies. You want something good to say. That comes from good writing. But writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately.

~ Jason Statham

I've yet to use a cellphone, and I've never tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day's writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

~ Pico Iyer

I'd love to act more. I've had to turn down multiple movies because I was on tour, but it's encouraging to know that someday there might be the right role, the right timing. And I've been writing a lot of music, so hopefully very soon I'll have recorded a project of my own. I also want to get a boat and open a restaurant.

~ Joe Jonas

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

~ Tom Stoppard

When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn't exist, and we didn't need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.

~ Al Franken

When I'm writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I'm watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don't immerse myself in whatever's going on in whatever area I'm working in.

~ Whit Stillman

Sometimes I have a melody in my head; sometimes it's just a verse. I read lines from a book or movies that I watch and grab a few quotes and start writing on paper. From there, I record a really rough version and work on the song.

~ Yuna