Quotes and Sayings About Writing

Now, if, as I think, writing should be, it's a kind of risky trade.
-- Al Alvarez

#Writing #Thinking #Kind

I don't consider myself an artist necessarily, but craftsmen or people in the arts, their spiritualism is sort of when you're writing well or performing well or doing whatever you do well, there's an element of that that's either God-given, a talent that you're not necessarily responsible for.
-- Al Franken

#Art #Writing #People

I am not a prisoner of my sexuality like men younger than myself although I write about being a prisoner.
-- Al Goldstein

#Writing #Men #Sexuality

We Americans write our own history. And the chapters of which we're proudest are the ones where we had the courage to change. Time and again, Americans have seen the need for change, and have taken the initiative to bring that change to life.
-- Al Gore

#Taken #Writing #Needs

The horrible truth is that I am lazy and I am going to write and do bits that just hand themselves to me.
-- Al Madrigal

#Writing #Hands #Lazy

I do believe, and I will always believe, that Shakespeare on film is really something that should be tried more often because it is an opportunity to take the humanity that Shakespeare writes into characters and express it.
-- Al Pacino

#Believe #Writing #Character

I started writing when I was about thirteen.
-- Al Purdy

#Writing #Thirteen

Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings.
-- Al-Ghazali

#Believe #Writing #Men

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
-- Alain de Botton

#Writing #Sane

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
-- Alain de Botton

#Writing #Self #Careers

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
-- Alain de Botton

#Book #Writing #Years

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.
-- Alain de Lille

#Writing #Animal #Men

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.
-- Alain Robbe-Grillet

#Writing #Way

Premie'  re approximation: j'e  cris pour de  truire, en les de  crivant avec pre  cision, des monstres nocturnes qui menacent d'envahir ma vie e  veille  e. First general point: I write to destroy, by describing exactly the nocturnal monsters that threaten to invade my waking life.
-- Alain Robbe-Grillet

#Writing #Monsters #Waking Life

What I always wanted to get seen as was as a good actor, when it was the acting I was doing. When I'm writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.
-- Alan Alda

#Writing #Trying #Acting

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.
-- Alan Bennett

#Inspirational #Wall #Writing

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he'd never have written a word.
-- Alan Bennett

#Wall #Nice #Writing

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.
-- Alan Bennett

#Book #Writing #Want

...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
-- Alan Bennett

#Reading #Writing #Impossible

I write plays about things that I can't resolve in my mind. I try to root things out.
-- Alan Bennett

#Writing #Play #Roots

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.
-- Alan Bradley

#Children #Writing #Ideas

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #Way

I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Morning #Reading #Writing

I've been writing full-time since 1978.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing

Don't try to write to the trend of the moment.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #Trying #Trends

There's certainly more new SF available than when I started writing. That means there's also more bad SF available. Whether there is also more good is a matter for future historians of the field.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #Mean #Matter

Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #Perfect #Important

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #Symphony #Notes

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.
-- Alan Dean Foster

#Writing #World #Funny Travel

Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don't tell them.
-- Alan Furst

#Writing #Character