Explore Quotes on Writing

The writing workshops and programs that are everywhere have encouraged writing. And if that produces more writing, it's also producing more readers of an elevated level. So all in all, a good thing.

The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.

There are writers for whom names mean nothing; everybody could be called John and Elizabeth, and the writing would be just as good. A name, of course, is like a piece of clothing, isn't it? It gives you an impression right away.

I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it's disheartening; you don't want to go on. That's what I think is hard - the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done.

I've done well because I'm lucky and I'm willing to be collaborative with the one thing you don't want to be collaborative with: your writing.

Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

You know when you're writing, and it's just you and the computer screen, and you never think that anyone is ever going to read it... you're able to say private things when you're writing.

I've always sort of felt like what the Shins is, I guess, is a vehicle for my writing.

There are aspects of writing that require you to image yourself in various roles and guises, to stand in the shoes of others, to 'act' on an inner stage.

I've grown more and more appreciative of good writing, and I now really hope I can become a better and better writer.

I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.

I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.

I grew up in a place where books were very, very scarce, and I loved to read. I used to read the writing on my breakfast Ovaltine over and over again because it was in front of me, and I couldn't help but read anything that was in front of me.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

Everyone who knew me as a child, they say they're not surprised that I became a writer because I wrote all the time. I don't remember writing, because I wouldn't have had the tools, but I think what they are saying is that I would pretend I was a writer.

Writing is still on my slate.

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.

Cheating tends to come up a lot in my songs. Betrayal fascinates me. I think the fact that you can trust someone so much and then they go against that has always plagued my writing for some reason.