Opinionative Writing Quotes

God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards! ~ Agatha Christie

When I say "work" I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs. ~ Margaret Laurence

At this stage, my chief professional goal is simply to keep on writing and making a living at it. ~ Fred Saberhagen

In writing about Red Guard activists during the Cultural Revolution, Anita Chan has observed that the "playing of a role in China was more than a sociological abstraction. Role-playing involved literal play-acting: a conscious assumption of the mannerisms and ways of speaking appropriate to the activist status and role."187 ~ Perry Link

I've been living. I've been doing the writing thing. I've been being the family man. I've been traveling the world. I been to, like, 18 cities last year. I've been getting my thoughts together, trying to figure out what's going on with hip-hop itself. ~ Raekwon

Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals. ~ Gloria E Anzaldua

Genius is the art of taking pains ~ Claude C. Hopkins

Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought. ~ Mark Kingwell

I never really wanted to write and wanted to focus on acting. ~ Abby Elliott

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it. ~ Rian Johnson

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. ~ Seamus Heaney

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink. ~ John Cage

If you wish to understand me at all (and to write an autobiography is only to open a window into one's heart) you must understand first and foremost, that I am an Australian. ~ Nellie Melba

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don't live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten. ~ Marie Howe

I like marketplaces. I like train stations; I like being in trains. I like airports. I like walking down the street with a pen in my hand, writing, writing, writing. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them. ~ Tahereh Mafi

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I needed to tell. ~ Sefi Atta

Writing is the greatest thing about really good sitcoms. ~ Megyn Price

The acting is something that will always be a part of my life, but the writing gives me a lot more creative freedom. You're a pawn in somebody else's chess game, whereas as a writer and as a director, you get to call the shots. And that's very thrilling. ~ Amber Benson

I was brought up in many different cultures, moving around all the time, and I find my identity in my songs. I project the identity I want to have throughout the songs that I write. ~ Mika.

When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing. ~ Samuel Hynes

You write who you are. But you also cheat, and youwrite what you want to be. It's embarrasing to be the guy who madethe movie, knowing you're not exactly who you want to be. ~ Paul Thomas Anderson

Leave off driving your composers. It might prove to be as dangerous as it is generally unnecessary. After all, composing cannot be turned out like spinning or sewing. Some respected colleagues (Bach, Mozart, Schubert) have spoilt the world terribly. But if we can't imitate them in the beauty of their writing, we should certainly beware of seeking to match the speed of their writing. It would also be unjust to put all the blame on idleness alone. Many factors combine to make writing harder for us (my contemporaries), and especially me. If, incidentally, they would use us poets for some other purpose, they would see that we are thoroughly and naturally industrious dispositions ... I have no time: otherwise I should love to chat on the difficulty of composing and how irresponsible publishers are. ~ Johannes Brahms

I don't care about wearing branded clothes or flaunting brands. But I do care about the books that I read and the music that I listen to. ~ Avijeet Das

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure. ~ Colm Toibin

Writing is eternal, For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent, And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe. As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin, So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul: The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture, And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Faith is a talent, and it goes the way of all your talents. Getting old is the subtraction of your powers. Which very much goes for writing. ~ Martin Amis

I never thought I'd write, because I'd never written anything in my whole life. ~ Linda Ronstadt

It's a very romantic sentiment, but to think that you would die if you didn't write, well, I would definitely choose to not write and live. ~ Sarah McLachlan

It's more believable that a cop would get involved in solving these murders. I mean, you're talking about writing a series. How believable is it that this Hollywood gossip columnist is going to keep stumbling on all these murders? ~ Josh Lanyon

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories. ~ Paul Gallico

I'm always really comfortable writing strong, smart ladies. That's kind of my bailiwick. ~ Chris Roberson

Writing and rewriting are the same thing to me. I don't believe what Allen Ginsberg said that "first thought, then - " I just don't believe that. ~ Lynne Tillman

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose. ~ Meg Wolitzer

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. ~ R.L. Stine

Now, instead of treating bad writing days as random, unavoidable disasters to be weathered, like thunderstorms, I started treating them as red flags. ~ Rachel Aaron

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing that while not writing ... ~ Josip Novakovich

Never write an advertisement which you wouldn't want your family to read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. ~ David Ogilvy