Writing famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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I need to be very hungry all the time. I need to be very hungry to write.
-- Amelie Nothomb -
A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love.
-- Ami McKay -
A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.
-- Amin Maalouf -
As a young woman, Ama Ata Aidoo the freedom fighter vowed never to write love stories. Let’s delight in the fact that over the years she has changed her mind about the value of writing about love, as her rich edited collection of highly original and diverse ‘African Love Stories’ demonstrates. She has traveled her path and had the courage to grow and change while retaining her deep commitment to Pan- Africanism. Love flourishes, after all is said and done.
-- Amina Mama -
What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.
-- Aminatta Forna -
If you have to write a fictional adventure to convey a philosophy of evil, the best person is the destroyer of evil himself, Lord Shiva.
-- Amish Tripathi -
Exercises are like prose, whereas yoga is the poetry of movements. Once you understand the grammar of yoga; you can write your poetry of movements.
-- Amit Ray -
With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.
-- Amity Shlaes -
Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott -
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
-- Amos Oz -
There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.
-- Amy Bloom -
My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.
-- Amy Bloom -
Learning to listen, letting people finish their sentences, and most of all, the habit of noticing the difference between what people say and how they say it. {on the habits of psychoanalytic training and practice applied to fiction writing} The gap between what people tell you and what's really going on is what interests me.
-- Amy Bloom -
Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.
-- Amy Clampitt -
Everybody has to write out of rage sometimes.
-- Amy Clampitt -
Love is an irrational force, making humans do all sorts of strange and wonderful things like write poetry and take up the ukulele.
-- Amy Dickinson -
I don't write songs that don't affect me on some level, because I figure if I am not moved by it, if its not something that I have a longing to celebrate or to be reminded of, if it doesn't affect me, then how can I possibly think it is going to affect somebody else. My touchstone is write something that matters.
-- Amy Grant -
I write about everything, but I just - how faith filters through all that and colors your opinion of other people and life and all that.
-- Amy Grant -
To me, it's all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it.
-- Amy Grant -
Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don't get all writerly: 'He opened the door.' There, it's open.
-- Amy Hempel -
I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
-- Amy Hempel -
Journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one. You are trained to get rid of anything nonessential. You go in, you start writing your article, assuming a person's going to stop reading the minute you give them a reason. So the trick is: don't give them one.
-- Amy Hempel -
I could claim any number of high-flown reasons for writing, just as you can explain certain dogs behavior... But maybe, it’s that they’re dog, and that’s what dogs do.
-- Amy Hempel -
I know when a story is finished when there is not a single thing more I can think to do to it. And since I know at the start what the last line will be, I know when I've reached that point as logically as I can that it's finished. As for the rewriting-it's not foolproof, of course, but if you're honest about having thought of every possibility and you still come back to what you have, what more can you do?
-- Amy Hempel -
Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
-- Amy Hempel -
I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.
-- Amy Hempel -
I'm singing from my heart now more than ever. I've gotten a lot braver with my writing.
-- Amy Lee -
My darlings, if I can't write dark, epic music, I can't live!
-- Amy Lee -
My biggest dream from the beginning - besides Evanescence - is scoring film and writing music for film.
-- Amy Lee -
I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what's going on in my heart and that's what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
-- Amy Lee -
Writing music is my therapy. It’s very purifying!
-- Amy Lee -
I write by myself initially. That's the way I've always written, just working on pure thought by myself. Then I bring it to the table with whoever I'm collaborating with.
-- Amy Lee -
I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.
-- Amy Lowell -
I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.
-- Amy Lowell -
The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not.
-- Amy Poehler -
A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.
-- Amy Poehler -
I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I've grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let's peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write.
-- Amy Poehler -
When I'm writing, which is 8-9 months out of the year, I'm in a concerted writing pace, where I work 5 days a week for at least a few hours a day, maybe a little bit more. But I won't work for more than 2 hours at a time. I'll work for a couple hours and take a break.
-- Amy Ray -
I think the musicians I play with solo do a certain thing that the musicians we play with with the Indigo Girls don't do. It's just a different thing. And it sort of steers my writing in some ways.
-- Amy Ray -
I have a lyric journal that I write in a lot. When I'm going to play, I just sit down and have my books with me and my notes and tapes and whatever I need to refer to. I just play and try different things. It's a kind of discipline.
-- Amy Ray -
Exercise your imagination muscle! How many uses can you come up with for a flowerpot? Write down your answers. But don't write them in this book. Grab a separate sheet of paper. I didn't spend two and a half weeks writing a book just so you could mark up the pages with your silly ideas for things you can do with a flowerpot. When it comes down to it, what's wrong with a flowerpot not being a flowerpot? Why is nothing ever good enough for you?
-- Amy Sedaris -
You have to live your story before being able to write your story.
-- Amy Shearn -
When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.
-- Amy Sherman-Palladino -
As a writer, all you want to do is write for great actors. That's all.
-- Amy Sherman-Palladino -
I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
-- Amy Tan -
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
-- Amy Tan -
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
-- Amy Tan -
I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
-- Amy Tan -
In [writing] fiction, every sentence is its own reward.
-- Amy Tan -
You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.
-- Amy Tan -
The muse appears at the point in my writing when I sense a subtle shift, a nudge to move over, and everything cracks open, the writing is freed, the lanuage is full, resources are plentiful, ideas pour forth, and to be frank, some of these ideas surprise me. It seems as thought the universe is my friend and is helping me write, its hand over mine.
-- Amy Tan -
You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.
-- Amy Tan -
I AM A PERSON WHO THINKS ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT WHEN I WRITE. I THINK ABOUT WHAT CAN'T BE KNOWN AND ONLY IMAGINED. I OFTEN SENSE A SPIRIT OR FORCE OR MEANING BEYOND MYSELF. I LEAVE IT OPEN AS TO WHAT THE SPIRIT IS, BUT I CONTINUE TO MAKE GUESSES.
-- Amy Tan -
I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.
-- Amy Waldman -
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
-- Amy Waldman -
Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.
-- Amy Waldman -
And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities.
-- Amy Waldman -
I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.
-- Amy Waldman -
I write songs about stuff that I can't really get past personally - and then I write a song about it and I feel better.
-- Amy Winehouse -
I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.
-- Amy Winehouse -
All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it's with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.
-- Amy Winehouse -
Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.
-- Amy Winehouse -
If you're nice to me I'll never write anything bad about you.
-- Amy Winehouse -
I always said I never wanted to write about love, but then I went and did that anyway.
-- Amy Winehouse -
I only write about stuff that’s happened to me.. stuff I can’t get past personally. Luckily, I'm quite self-destructive.
-- Amy Winehouse -
I'm a young woman and I'm going to write about what I know.
-- Amy Winehouse -
You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.
-- Anais Nin -
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
-- Anais Nin -
I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.
-- Anais Nin -
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
-- Anais Nin -
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
-- Anais Nin -
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
-- Anais Nin -
My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
-- Anais Nin -
Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.
-- Anais Nin -
Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.
-- Anais Nin -
When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.
-- Anais Nin -
To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.
-- Anais Nin -
I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.
-- Anais Nin -
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
-- Anais Nin -
Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.
-- Anais Nin -
I went to USC for writing. I was judgmental of actors and their Starbucks and fancy cars.
-- Analeigh Tipton -
I moved to L.A. to write and direct. I had no intentions of being in front of the camera.
-- Analeigh Tipton -
A writer is the one who loves to write . . . on and about anything . . . And this clears that I am a writer!!
-- Anamika Mishra -
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want.
-- Anatole Broyard -
In an age like ours, which is not given to letter-writing, we forget what an important part it used to play in people's lives.
-- Anatole Broyard -
People ... have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
-- Anatole Broyard -
Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.
-- Anatole Broyard -
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
-- Anatole France -
The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.
-- Anatole France -
You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
-- Anatole France -
My goal was to do anything that would lead to a job. I know that writing would not lead to a job. It's too fancy for me. My biggest goal was to be an office receptionist, answer phones. I didn't expect to go beyond that.
-- Anchee Min -
Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist
-- Andre Bazin -
I don't freestyle, but when I'm writing and thinking, sometimes things pop up - that's basically a freestyle.
-- Andre Benjamin -
Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to express, whether verbally or in writing, or in any other way, the real process of thought. Thought's dictation, free from any control by the reason, independent of any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.
-- Andre Breton -
Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again: I knew nothing about it.
-- André Brink -
I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.
-- Andre Dubus -
What would there be in a story of happiness? Only what prepares it, only what destroys it can be told.
-- Andre Gide -
It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.
-- Andre Gide -
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
-- Andre Gide -
Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.
-- Andre Gide