Best 30386 quotes in «writing quotes» category

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it.

If you can remember all the accessories that go with your best outfit, the contents of your purse, the starting lineup of the New York Yankees or the Houston Oilers, or what label "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys was on, you are capable of remembering the differences between a gerund (verb form used as a noun) and a participle (verb form used as an adjective).

If you can just focus on creating your art whether that's music or writing a book or painting trust me it is really hard to balance that with a personal life. You have to be willing to sacrifice sometimes things in your personal life if your ultimate goal is to pursue things as an artist.

If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.

If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.

If you can stand to wait 24 hours before you decide the fate of what you have written - either good or bad - you're more likely to see that invisible thing that is invisible for the first few days in any new writing. We just can't know what all is in a sentence until there are several sentences to follow it. Pages of writing need more pages in order to be known, chapters need more chapters.

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will write for you.

If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time.

If you come from a working-class background, you can't afford to write full time, because you're just not being paid. Basically, all my arguments come down to Marxist doctrine: The world is shaped by money, so the only voices you'll hear are the ones with money behind them. But thankfully, culture and cool are some things that circumvent money, because if you're cool, people will want to give you money - suddenly you shape the market and people start coming to you. Which is why culture has always been a traditional way out for working-class people.

If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing bsuiness at all.

If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make.

If you choose your subject selectively - intuitively - the camera can write poetry.

If you can't handle the responsibility of a hit single, don't write one.

If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

If you can write each day, do it, and meet a quota. Minimum 350 words a day. A baboon can do 350 words a day. Don't be shown up by a baboon

If you caricature friends in your first novel they will be upset, but if you don't they will feel betrayed.

If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

If you can't write the next line, well, you're dead. The past doesn't matter.

If you can't read and write you can't think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don't know how to read and write. You've got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.

If you can write a character who is attractive but morally reprehensible, then you've got a character. It's got to feel like people I know and it doesn't just become a bag of tricks.

If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English and write their names and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than two hundred and fifty dollars and pay taxes thereon, and would completely disarm the adversary. This you can do with perfect safety. And as a consequence, the radicals, who are wild upon negro franchise, will be completely foiled in their attempts to keep the Southern States from renewing their relations to the Union.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren’t, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?

If you dared to put your opinion into a factual piece, your editors said, "You can't do this. Write an op-ed.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.

If you do improvising, it can sometimes end up being a waste of time. And if you do that, it's more or less based on a writing process.

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

If you don't care about science enough to be interested in it on its own, you shouldn't try to write hard science fiction. You can write like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison as much as you want.

If you don't have a burning passion for writing, how can you expect anyone else to be moved by what you write?

If you do not love what you do, if you are not appropriately grateful for the chance to create something magical each time you sit down at the computer or with a pencil and paper in hand, somewhere along the way your writing will betray you.

If you don't compromise your gift, if you write each day as well as you can, and then submit your work and not worry about it and go on to the next piece, you suddenly find oddly enough that you're no more interested in the applause than the silence. You don't hear either one of them. You can never listen to the naysayers. If you do you won't survive.

If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novel, find a book you do like. Life is too short to be miserable. If you do like my novels, I commend your good taste.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

If you don't remember childhood and you idealize it, you can't write books for kids because they're not real. Kids pick that up.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

if you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. ... you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentimemnt falls to sentimentality - you can write about life, but never write life itself.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional.