How To Write Quotes

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [ ... ] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way. ~ Rasmus Lerdorf

I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them. ~ John Patrick Shanley

I don't assume, because I can write screenplays, that I know how to write a novel. It's a very different world. There's a craft involved in storytelling, and it's a different kind of craft. But yes, someday I will do that. It just might be awhile. ~ Melissa Rosenberg

Sometimes, I don't know that words for things,
how to write down the feeling of knowing
that every dying person leaves something behind. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

It was tricky [to write about Israelis], because everyone has an opinion about the Arab - Israeli conflict, and when I first started writing these stories, I was working for an Arab - Israeli human rights group. It was during the Second Intifada. It was this totally violent and intense time, and I think there's a part of me where I don't know how to write about that situation without getting my politics out of my messages, and that's something that was important for me not to do in this book. ~ Molly Antopol

To know whom to write for is to know how to write. ~ Virginia Woolf

It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language. ~ Kim Hyesoon

The vast majority of you are going to close this tab without, even for a single moment, entertaining the thought of writing something.

Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Learning the fine rationalist art of CoZE (comfort zone expansion) is a really important life skill, and putting your writing online is a low-risk way to do that. Don't try to cop out with "I don't have any stories." Baloney. Everyone has stories; write up a memory that's important to you. And don't even try to tell me, "Oh, but I don't know how to write!" Neither did I when I started; I learned by doing. So please, set the excuses aside, put something up on the web, and share it with the rest of us. When you do, drop me a PM; I'll leave you your first review, but you have to publish something first.

Well? What are you waiting for? Seriously. Go write one sentence of a new story, write now. ~ David K. Storrs

When I went to the University of Iowa in order to be a writer, I thought, This is the worst way to learn how to write. To sit in a room with a bunch of would-be writers, who want to write the Great American Novel, every one of them, and you read their stories and they read yours, and you're not living a life. I don't like that. I like learning on the job. The character of my work has definitely evolved from the character of my life. ~ Joe Frank

There are no real guidelines or maps in Australia as to how to write a show, whereas in Hollywood it's where the TV industry is created and there's a lot of work that goes into development. ~ Jason Gann

The last thing reporters and editors want to be told is what to do and how to write. They don't want to be some politically correct, Orwellian, kind of like "you're telling me how to write about ... ?" ~ Jose Antonio Vargas

Maybe you didn't need to know anything special to write a work of fiction. Maybe you didn't need to delve into some kind of life question you knew you'd lived. Perhaps your subconscious would do the job for you, if only you dared to dream. ~ L.L. Barkat

How to Write a Thesis," then, isn't just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It's also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with "the knowledge that anyone can teach us something." It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one's own voice. ~ Anonymous

Once you understand how to write a program get someone else to write it. ~ Alan Perlis

What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write. ~ Gustave Flaubert

And I said to him when you learn to read then you learn everything you didnt know before. But when you write you write only what you know allready so patientia Im better off not knowing how to write because the ass is the ass ~ Umberto Eco

I'd hear a tune in my head and the words would come. And then, very suddenly it just stopped. It seemed too stilted to try and learn how to write a song, to go to round robins and to learn things from other people on how to write a song. So I just stopped and did other things. ~ Joan Baez

I spent 11 years at 'The Daily Show,' and I learned everything there about how to write funny, how to write funny on topic. ~ David Javerbaum

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story. ~ John Green

As a writer, I marinate, speculate, and hibernate. ~ Trisha Sugarek

When I started out playing guitar and singing, I was about twelve, going on thirteen. The role models for me back then were the folk singers. They all had these high, really nice voices and ranges, like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, and then later, of course, Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt. I decided early on that I was going to learn how to write songs really, really well, because I didn't want to have to compete as a singer. I didn't feel that it was my strong point. ~ Lucinda Williams

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write. ~ Hisham Matar

you see, the thing is, I just don't know
how to write anything that doesn't
start with a lump in my throat.
And I really don't know how to write anything
that doesn't end with your hands on my neck. ~ Danabelle Gutierrez

At X-Feer, we teach how to solve problems not how to write a code because that's the most important thing in coding. ~ Ahmed Abu Taha

The modelling was fun but I don't see it the same as music, because with modelling, I was just kind of lucky, I just fell into it. I got discovered at a train station when I'd just turned 15, I was working full-time by 16, moved overseas and then just kept at it and made it a life. Whereas with my music, I've really struggled through and worked hard, learnt how to write and I've kept developing that. ~ Erica Packer

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The fact is, when I wrote 'Juno' - and I think this is part of its charm and appeal - I didn't know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made! ~ Diablo Cody

The problem is not one of technical knowledge but of organization; you know how to write the code but not ~ Sandi Metz

I don't know how to write a children's book. ~ Maurice Sendak

But instead of thinking about my book and how to write it, as I go pacing the floor, I fall to counting my footsteps until I feel about to go mad. ~ Thomas Bernhard

I don't therefore know how to write for the big papers. It must be kids - students - and retired people. And the reality is they are overwhelmed with people sending in their holiday stories and bits and pieces and so on. ~ John Gimlette

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written. ~ Alice Hoffman

I think it's important to let each thing you write teach you how to write it. You must listen to what you do. Let it be in control. I don't step in until I know what it demands of me. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

I think that every one whom you may ask how to write a play will reply, if he really can write one, that he doesn't know how it is done. It is a little as if you were to ask Romeo what he did to fall in love with Juliet and to make her love him; he would reply that he did not know, that it simply happened.
Well, my dear friend, if you want me to be quite frank, I'll own up that I don't know how to write a play. One day a long time ago, when I was scarcely out of school, I asked my father the same question. He answered: It's very simple; the first act clear, the last act short, and all the acts interesting. ~ Alexandre Dumas-fils

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences. ~ Tom Robbins

I is reading it hundreds of times,' the BFG said. 'And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.'
Sophie took the book out of his hand. 'Nicholas Nickleby,' she read aloud.
'By Dahl's Chickens,' the BFG said. ~ Roald Dahl

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery. ~ Anthony Marra

I almost don't know how to write an email. ~ Marjane Satrapi

Let every young man and woman be warned by my example, and understand that good handwriting is a necessary part of education. I am now of the opinion that children should first be taught the art of drawing before learning how to write. Let the child learn his letters by observation as he does different objects, such as flowers, birds, etc., and let him learn handwriting only after he has learnt to draw objects. He will then write a beautifully formed hand. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

If you don't write the story, who will? ~ Ora Rosalin

Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You'll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down. ~ Kevin Hearne

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system. ~ Mark Zuckerberg

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself. ~ Harper Lee

Everything can be learned, including, to a very large extent, to be what you are not. You can learn to be pretty if you are plain, charming if you are dull, thin if you are fat, youthful if you are aging, how to write though you are inarticulate, how to make money though you are not good with figures. ~ Henry Anatole Grunwald

We'd all like to see our poems walking alone in the world. Like children reared to be independent adults. Some parents raise a child conservatively (that is, with no exposure to the darker things awaiting them beyond the door), but you can see how that's a mistake right? There's no way to know how best to prepare a child for the future. No way to know how to write a publishable poem -- I'm not saying safe poems don't get published. Or that sheltered children can't succeed. Just that you write the best poems you can and send them out. Sometimes they return home weeping. Sometimes they make their own way. ~ Terrence K. Hayes

It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it. ~ G. Willow Wilson

The biggest secret that traders don't want the world to know is that anyone with a more or less sane disposition can do what they're doing. The trick is getting access to the trough, to the P&L, to the "book." The road toward it is tough, treacherous and crowded. On the way there, you will be misled into believing that in order to be a trader you must have a physics PhD, or know how to write code and build models, or have a top-school MBA, or, when all else fails, just be a young Caucasian male. But in the end, it doesn't matter who made it to the top. In the end, it all comes down to merely placing a bet. ~ Katya G. Cohen

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know - if we know anything at all - is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt - spectacularly, brazenly - into the unknown. ~ Dani Shapiro

My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write. ~ Vik Muniz

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories. ~ Elmore Leonard

I wish I could remember how to write a play. I can't remember how they happened. ~ Tom Stoppard

Pop songs are not as graceful as they used to be. Performers today haven't gone through the regimen of learning how to write. And of course, everyone wants to own copyrights. ~ Hal David

But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry. ~ W.S. Merwin

As Frances had learned to do in times of uncertainty, she created a project over which she had total control and began writing a book "Dedicated to the memory of Irving Thalberg as a tribute to his vision and genius." How to Write and Sell Film Stories was written for "serious students of film technique." She filled the straightforward textbook with anecdotes from her films and others' to convey the lessons on the development of plot, motivation, and characters she had learned with Thalberg. She had come to believe that because of increased censorship and the limited number of adaptable plays and novels, "eighty percent of the motion pictures produced will be soon be stories written exclusively for the screen" and the time was right for a book on original screenplays. The audience for the book was immediate; universities ordered copies before it was published and it quickly went into several printings. The book led to her taking on an advice column on screen writing for Cinema Progress, a serious educational film magazine published by the American Institute of Cinematography based at the University of Southern California. She opened her house to roundtable discussions with students and sponsored a scenario contest with the winners serving as studio "apprentices. ~ Cari Beauchamp

I can't read, I don't know how to write, my whole life has been one big fight. ~ Albert King

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant. ~ Louis L'Amour

If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say. ~ Ann Patchett

When I met a truly beautiful girl, I would tell her that if she spent the night with me, I would write a novel or a story about her. This usually worked; and if her name was to be in the title of the story, it almost always worked. Then, later, when we'd passed a night of delicious love-making together, after she'd gone and I'd felt that feeling of happiness mixed with sorrow, I sometimes would write a book or story about her. Sometimes her character, her way about herself, her love-making, it sometimes marked me so heavily that I couldn't go on in life and be happy unless I wrote a book or a story about that woman, the happy and sad memory of that woman. That was the only way to keep her, and to say goodbye to her without her ever leaving. ~ Roman Payne

I've said for years - ever since I figured out how to write Goblin Hero - that it's important to give yourself permission to write crap. Perfection is the destroyer of art. It's paralyzing. Art, whether it's writing or painting or anything else, requires risk. And risk means you're going to make mistakes. Sometimes you're going to fail. ~ Jim C. Hines

So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad. ~ Thomas Ligotti

I didn't just appear one day. I didn't just wake up and know how to write my name. I keep writing, knowing now that I was a long time coming. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one. ~ Grace Paley

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling. ~ Kate Atkinson

I was very young, maybe five. The opera was very ... I was attracted to opera to the point that I think it's the reason I started to write music for films. I never studied. There are film and music school that teach you how to write music. I never studied that. But the influence of opera, which is a combination of storyline, visuals, staging, plus music ... that was perhaps the best school I could have had. That's what gave me the idea of coming to Hollywood to write music for films. ~ Lalo Schifrin

No one can teach you how to write. A writer writes, plain and simple. You improve by doing. ~ Scott Ciencin

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest. ~ Barry Mann

They believed that every man should know how to read and how to write, and should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. That is the glory of the Puritan fathers. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say. I would not begin to know how to teach another person how to have character, which was what Grace Paley did. ~ Ann Patchett

I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me. ~ Carl Sandburg

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator. ~ Nataly Kelly

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book. ~ Terry Brooks

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter," says an African proverb. But what if the lionesses write eloquently but the editors prefer the hunters' version? ~ Rebecca Solnit

The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences
they are not illiterate
but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them, and form something new. They read James Baldwin or Henry David Thoreau and their primary reaction seems to be, "Okay, now I've ready that. I'm done." As if the only goal in reading was to have looked at every word. ~ Dinty W. Moore

I just believe that young people need to be able to learn how to write in their own voice. Just like a musician, you pride yourself on having your own distinct sound. ~ Terry McMillan

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise. ~ Steven Pinker

Your ability to name every single variation of Kryptonite and every first issue in which it appears is a great pop quiz skill, but is not a great writing skill, all right? So just because you can do that doesn't mean you know how to write. ~ Greg Rucka

My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life. ~ Riccardo Tisci

A writer is a person who writes.

Actually, it was John Braine's quote in his book HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL. But I use it all the time ~ Andrew Puckett

I think that songwriting is understood from an early age that was the priority to figure out first. Learn to write a good song, and then figure out who you are as an artist because, once you know how to write a good song, you can dress it in any kind of clothing. ~ Lights

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing. ~ Gene Wolfe

Our clever friend Feynman demonstrated how to write down the Equation of the Universe in a single line. Here it is:

U = 0

U is a definite mathematical function, the total unworldliness. It's the sum of contributions from all the piddling partial laws of physics. To be precise, U = Unewton + Ueinstein +.... Here, for instance, the Newtonian mechanical unworldiness Unewton is defined by Unewton = (F - ma)^2; the Einstein mass-energy Unworldliness is definedby Ueinstein = (E - mc^2) ^2; and so forth. Because every contribution is positive or zero, the only way that the total U can vanish is for every contribution to vanish, so U = 0 implies F=ma, E=mc^2, and any other past or future law you care to include!

Thus we can capture all the laws of physics we know, and accommodate all the laws yet to be discovered, in one unified equation. The Theory of Everything!!! But it's a complete cheat, of course, because there is no way to use (or even define) U, other than to deconstruct it into its separate pieces and then use those. ~ Frank Wilczek

In order to become a better innovator, you're going to learn how to write songs. ~ Cliff Goldmacher

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I would sooner be robbed by a fan than a company. The fan may be broke and have but one choice. There is no excuse for the way the "songwriter" is robbed by everyone from the record company to the broadcaster, by the pure bottom line, greed. If it continues, sadly, in time, the music will suffer. It takes many many years to learn how to write a song properly. Songwriters will be forced to hit the road in order to make a decent living and, in my opinion, these two careers are related but not compatible. ~ Mickey Newbury

I've learned to write by mimicking other writers. It's the way we learned to speak - reproducing sounds - and it's the way, I think, to learn how to write. ~ Adam Sexton

Azazel is also listed as one of the Watchers, angelic creatures from the Book of Enoch, a text no longer canonical under any large Christian faith. These Watchers were not expelled from Paradise, but were punished by god for having children with humans, and teaching them science, technology, and other crafts. Azazel in particular taught humans how to make weapons, as well as ornaments and cosmetics. Other Watchers taught them how to write and make paper, how to read signs and predict the weather, and how to study the heavens with astrology. ~ Anonymous

I can draw pencil lines to show something is moving, but if I'm writing, I struggle with how to write it. The boy ran down the hallway? The boy ran quickly down the hallway? The boy ran down the marble hallway? I agonize over the words. So my editor works very hard. I'm lucky to have her. ~ Brian Selznick

I think it's sort of an outrage that companies should have to hire firms to teach the college graduates they employ how to write. ~ Derek Bok

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. - ~ Stephen King

(...) the so-called democratization of reviews means the lowering of standards, and that subject knowledge, history and critical context are at risk of being lost in favour of people who only know how to write in attention-seeking soundbites. ~ Bernardine Evaristo

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays. ~ Jose Saramago

Students told me he was the most extraordinary man they'd ever encountered. He had seemed not quite of this world, they said. He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same. He didn't so much teach them how to write poetry, they said, but why: because of delight. Because of stubborn gladness. He told them that they must live their most creative lives as a means of fighting back against the ruthless furnace of this world. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

When asked for advice on how to write a short story, Carlos Cortés responded, No advice. Every writer has to exorcise his own demons. ~ Carlos Cortés

During my career as a standup and actor, I realized it was very frustrating for me to get hired because Hollywood was hiring a different kind of brother, you know, and I was doing political humor. In order for me to really have a long career, I'm going to have to learn how to write and produce for myself. I had no idea I was really going to like it and I'm very fortunate to be successful. But the idea was to always eventually create something for myself. That was the idea from the beginning when I went into writing and producing. ~ Larry Wilmore

Saunders writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being. He teaches us not only how to write but how to live. He sets the bar and also the example. He hopes we might see the possibility of our better selves and act on it. He seems sent - what other way to put it? - to teach us mercy and grace. ~ George Saunders

Heroes and heroines OR ... Your lead character doesn't have to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he doesn't have to stop speeding bullets with his bare hands, but he darn well better know the difference between right and wrong, and he better be kind to animals, and it sure wouldn't hurt any if he brushed his teeth regularly"
Dean Koontz in "How To Write Best Selling Fiction ~ Dean Koontz

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know. ~ Anthony Marra

I feel like I know how to write plot. ~ Mike White

I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading. ~ Amy Bloom