Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief.

Albom with Trent Willmon is the first project that I haven't had to scrap money together for. The is the first time I've used any outside songs at all; until now it's only been stuff that I've written. This is also the first album of mine that's had any co-writes on it, as well. It's a big step, coming off of anything we've ever done before.

Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing M*A*S*H; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.

A large part of academic community is unthinkingly self-involved, producing reams of sterile writing - often consuming unbelievable amounts of public funds - and serving as an instruction manual for how to chase away readers and ignore historical insights.

Album sales have collapsed, with few artists making money from albums; touring is more lucrative. But I'm 53 now and won't be able to tour forever, so a logical step is to get into writing film scores. Trouble is, you need to be somewhere which has a big film industry - another reason why I'm thinking about living in California.

A lamp can only light another lamp when it continues to burn in its own flame.

[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him.

[Albert] Camus writes his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher.

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing

A leader whose speech is prepared by others is not a leader; he is just an empty and stupid bottle! Use your own ideas and your own brain; write your own speech, just like Gandhi, Churchill or Nehru! That is indeed a good ethics and a good honour!

A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing.

[Alex] Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

'Alien' asked ground-breaking questions about eco-politics and female empowerment. 'The Matrix' delved deeper into the concept of perception versus reality than perhaps any other film I know. But for some reason, we tend not to remember the significance of their writing.

Alimony is the curse of the writing class.

Alice and I, we'd met before, but we were able to kind of sit and chat on the set of Dark Shadows, and talk about maybe writing some songs together. We started doing that, and then one thing led to another and it became this Vampire project - because he was telling stories about all those days, which were fascinating.

Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

A life spent writing has taught me to be wary of words. Those that seem clearest are often the most treacherous.

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

A little love has made me willingly study, preach, write, and even suffer.

Allah is in Himself the non-being and the being, the inexistent and the existent. He is at the same time that which we designate by absolute non-being and by absolute being; or by relative non-being and relative being. . . . All these designation come back to God alone, for there is nothing which we can perceive, know, write or say which is not Him.

A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!

A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy — or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others. To develop ‘Hidden Art’ will also, of course, take time and energy – and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities

All characters are based on elements of a writer's personal experience.

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

All archaeologists in Israel and Palestine make use of the New Testament Gospels. They do this because the Gospels exhibit verisimilitude. In short, the Gospels help archaeologists know where to dig and they help archaeologists understand what they unearth. The 2nd-century Gospels and Gospel-like writings rarely exhibit verisimilitude, so archaeologists rarely appeal to them.

All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.

All clean and comfortable I sit down to write.

Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing.

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

Allegories drawn to great length will always break.

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics.

All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God. Just imagine the great creative Source needing an excuse. It doesn't have any concept of, "I'm too busy. I'm too old. I'm too afraid. Things are going to take too long." Source doesn't work like that. The Tao does nothing, Lao-tzu writes, but it leaves nothing undone.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

All good plots come from well-orchestrated characters pitted against one another in a conflict of wills.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

All experience is memory, and so everything you write about is from memory-unless you're writing about typing.

All good writers inspire me as I have never thought I was any good. As far as a writer who made me think I could do it, it was Henry Miller. Not because I thought he was so simple that I reckoned I could pull it off as well, but it was his freedom and guts that really moved me to want to write all the time.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

All great writers are schizophrenics, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause they switch up. They become the person when they write.

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

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

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.