The Write Time Quotes

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all. ~ Kenneth Atchity

Matthew Watkins At the first Thanksgiving, one of the bloodiest battles ensued when it was discovered that the deliveryman forgot to bring extra duck sauce. Finn Is God is, on this enchanted evening, in love with a wonderful guy. Julie Seagle Going to write a book called "Binge, Screw, Loathe." It will be about a hateful woman who travels across the US visiting all-you-can-eat brothels. ~ Jessica Park

I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children's stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, 'Can't you write anything normal?' ~ Octavia E. Butler

Write about the truth. If you write about the truth, somebody's living that. Not just somebody, there's a lot of people. ~ Loretta Lynn

Make the decision that you'll no longer use excuses to keep you from what you know is in your best interest. Today, act on something you've always avoided and explained away with a convenient excuse. Make a phone call you've been putting off, write a letter to a friend, put on a pair of walking shoes and go for a stroll, clean out your closet - do something you've been justifying not doing with excuses. ~ Wayne Dyer

I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone, I sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Write a lot. And I mean a ridiculous amount. You have to write so much that you don't mind throwing away and changing things that you've written - which is the second thing you have to do. A lot of young writers are very precious about their words. Don't be - you've got to be ready to burn stuff. You're not as good as you think you are, at least not yet. The more you write, the faster you'll write, and the less you'll mind throwing stuff out. ~ Josh Lieb

You might 'write from the heart,' but you'd better polish with your brain. ~ Margaret Atwood

It seems like whenever you write about Muslims, people assume that you're writing about the Quran, you are writing about the Prophet Muhammad. There's no sense that Muslims are capable of individualism, that they're capable of making mistakes that are somehow not connected to Islam. ~ G. Willow Wilson

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done. ~ Clifford Geertz

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Some people write letters, in the library. ~ Margaret Atwood

You can draw a line between what I'm interested in and what I'm not interested in. On one side you can name Dylan and Lennon, who observe the world and have feelings, and write songs directly from those feelings. On the vapid side you have pop groups who need material and write songs to fill the hole, rather than getting somebody else. ~ Roger Waters

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song. ~ Jason Mraz

In many respects most of the books I write deal with well-known people. I think of those books as more about me than about those people. ~ Adam Braver

Hold fast to the Bible as the sheet-anchor of your liberties; write its precepts in your hearts, and practice them in your lives. ~ Ulysses S. Grant

Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'
Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly. ~ Hazel Osmond

My percussionist boyfriend graduated and went away to grad school a few semesters later, but not before he introduced me to the most amazing thing I'd ever experienced. No, not sex (I'm a lady; I don't write about that) but something just as good: the World Wide Web. It ~ Felicia Day

We [he and Halmos] share a philosophy about linear algebra: we think basis-free, we write basis-free , but when the chips are down we close the office door and compute with matrices like fury. ~ Irving Kaplansky

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write. ~ Gail Godwin

A strong tie binds novelists to their mother tongue. Though novelists can and do write in languages other than their own, there is a common belief that a novel has a special, almost mystical affinity with the novelist's mother tongue. ~ Minae Mizumura

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be. ~ Terry Brooks

Now, Sophia, would you care to tell me why you're here by the pond instead of reporting to your next class?'
'I'm experiencing some teenage angst, Mrs. Casnoff,' I answered. 'I need to, like, write in my journal or something. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes. ~ David Rabe

Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write. ~ Martin Amis

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday. ~ Yiyun Li

I love making up stories. I love getting lost in other worlds and being with other characters. I love the way I think I'm in control and then the characters and stories take on a life of their own.
I love how I can incorporate my own faith into the stories I write.
Writing is both discovery and creating and with each book I do that. Discover and create. It can be an adventure some days, a nightmare others. I also like that I can do this wearing ugly clothes. ~ Carolyne Aarsen

It's hard for me to speak, whether in English or Afrikaans. The reason I write is because I cannot speak. I feel blunt. ~ Antjie Krog

I know some children's writers write for specific children, or for the children they once were, but I never have. I just thought children might like my sort of visual humour. ~ Quentin Blake

The most exciting thing I aspire to do is to write something new that I know is going to work, or perform something that I know is going to make people laugh. ~ B.J. Novak

Would you like me to write Mrs. Ames about inviting you to Yaddo? Get Miss Moore to write too. You can't invite yourself, though, of course, almost all the invitations are planned. It would be marvelous to have you there. I know the solitude that gets too much. It doesn't drug me, but I get fantastic and uncivilized.
At last my divorce [from Jean Stafford] is over. It's funny at my age to have one's life so much in and on one's hands. All the rawness of learning, what I used to think should be done with by twenty-five. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I'm thankful, and call it good, as Eliot would say. ~ Robert Lowell

When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on. ~ John Scofield

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that. ~ Graham Nelson

Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. ~ Matthew Arnold

As I write this it sounds rather negative and hard but I do not mean it to be so. Happiness grounded in reality is far deeper than that built upon fantasy, and suffering teaches one that happiness can catch a person unawares in the midst of deprivation and desolation. There is a certain stripping away of the externals which makes one more sensitive to joy as well as to sorrow. ~ Sheila Cassidy

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks ~ Kenneth Koch

'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them. ~ Ice Cube

Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness? ~ Chris Cleave

Too many Americans have twisted the sensible right to pursue happiness into the delusion that we are entitled to a guarantee of happiness. If we don't get exactly what we want, we assume someone must be violating our rights. We're no longer willing to write off some of life's disappointments to simple bad luck. ~ Susan Jacoby

I can't become naked for everybody. It's never going to be possible for the person to write the whole story completely, so I find bits of myself, bits of what I think in some articles. And I don't give lip service to journalists. I never make them feel comfortable. I say, "It's your job to make the story." ~ Rei Kawakubo

In this day and age, you can write anywhere in the world. You can really live anywhere and have the same career. ~ Chevy Stevens

So often I wonder, do all brothers end up at Kitty Hawk? Flipping a coin to write history. One will fly. The other stands slack-jawed with awe. Maybe chasing his brother. The wind in his face now. The wind that lifts his brother. ~ Michael Hainey

I don't feel that I decided deliberately I'm going to write something and have it stand alone. Somewhere by the end I think it would probably revert to imagery. ~ Raymond Pettibon

True storytellers write not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story. ~ John Freeman

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller. ~ Italo Calvino