Writing Drinking Quotes

I often wonder if all the writers who are alcoholics drink a lot because they aren't writing. It is not because they are writers that they are drinking, but because they are writers who are not writing. ~ Natalie Goldberg

You know, Volkov, your talents as a drinker are only partly utilised. With such a vast wealth of alcoholic experience, you could earn a handsome living by writing drinking songs and become illustriously prosperous. ~ Stanley Goldyn

Wine drinking goes back at least six thousand years. Wine writing probably began a year or two later. ~ Frank J. Prial

Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation - the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline. ~ Peter De Vries

Many contemporary authors drink more than they write. ~ Maxim Gorky

Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.
But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.
Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age. ~ Chitralekha Paul

I'd hooked on to that one word, pretending. What Dr. Raeburn would never understand was that pretending was what had got me this far. I remembered the morning of my mother's funeral. I'd been given milk to settle my stomach; I'd pretended it was coffee. I imagined I was drinking coffee elsewhere. Some Arabic-speaking country where the thick coffee served in little cups was so strong it could keep you awake for days. Some Arabic country where I'd sit in a tented café and be more than happy to don a veil. ~ Z.Z. Packer

Maria? ... She's been writing all this down? Oh, bless her ... ' He leafed on through the pile. 'Although that's not how that happened ... and no, she's wrong, bowties are cool. ~ James Goss

I never intended to write poems, nor to be a photographer, nor to be a film-maker. I just took many, many pictures and I would put them in an album, and then some years later I decided to show them and suddenly I was called a photographer. Same thing with my poetry. They're notes that I'd written in a book and it may be considered poetry. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

The first thing that happens is the cleansing of the former character. I don't think a lot of actors talk about it, but there is usually a process where you essentially purge yourself of the character played prior to the movie. Then you want to think about what the character represents, and you write down all of the elements about this character and then take the time to find some synchronicity and start breathing the character. ~ Vin Diesel

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing? ~ Anne Tyler

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic. ~ Shelley Berman

Writers tend to consider distinction and originality as virtues, but they are anathema to publishers. ~ Thomas M. Disch

I can't imagine ever not making music, making albums, writing songs, doing shows. That's all I really know, and that's all I really do. ~ Pixie Lott

A good writer does not write as people write, but as he writes. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

When I'm drawing, I only do that at home, really, at my drawing table. But writing I could do in other places. So I've written in airports, in hotels, different places. ~ Kevin Henkes

I believe that writing for me is in a way like wisdom; in that as soon as you feel like you've got it figured out you stop growing and maybe even lose something. ~ Brandi Carlile

The next thing Jordana says makes me realize that it's too late to save her.
"I've noticed that when you light a match, the flame is the same shape as a falling tear."
She's been sensitized, turned gooey in the middle. I saw it happening and I didn't do anything to stop it. From now on, she'll be writing diaries and sometimes including little poems and she'll buy gifts for her favourite teachers and she'll admire the scenery and she'll watch the news and she'll buy soup for homeless people and she'll never burn my leg hair again. ~ Joe Dunthorne

Words have to be crafted, not sprayed. They need to be fitted together with infinite care. ~ Norman Cousins

Stop trying to write sentences and start trying to write stories. ~ James Patterson

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. ~ Sylvia Plath

Every letter
that she types;
every keystroke
that she strikes-
To spell your name
again and again,
is all she ever
wants to write. ~ Lang Leav

To return to antiquity [in literature]: that has been done. To return to the Middle Ages: that too has been done. Remains the present day. But the ground is shaky: so where can you set the foundations? An answer to this question must be found if one is to produce anything vital and hence lasting. All this disturbs me so much that I no longer like to be spoken to about it. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain. ~ James Wolcott

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. ~ Audre Lorde

I've always loved writing emotionally rich, character-driven novels that explore the way people fall in love and deal with life's triumphs and tragedies. I enjoy writing the contemporary and historical books equally, though perhaps 'enjoy' is the wrong word. ~ Susan Wiggs

It's the natural trajectory of a writing career that a writer becomes better at being herself. ~ Amy Hempel

Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

Partying and dancing have never been my thing, but drinking I could do with reasonable familiarity and skills. I decided to begin there. ~ Vann Chow

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

Whoever is able to write a book and does not, it is as if he has lost a child ~ Nachman Of Breslov

Cultural evolution can proceed so quickly because it operates, as biological evolution does not, in the "Lamarckian" mode - by the inheritance of acquired characters. Whatever one generation learns, it can pass to the next by writing, instruction, inculcation, ritual, tradition, and a host of methods that humans have developed to assure continuity in culture. Darwinian evolution, on the other hand, is an indirect process: genetic variation must first be available to construct an advantageous feature, and natural selection must then preserve it. Since genetic variation arises at random, not preferentially directed toward advantageous features, the Darwinian process works slowly. Cultural evolution is not only rapid; it is also readily reversible because its products are not coded in our genes. ~ Stephan Jay Gould

For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue. ~ Athol Fugard

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now. ~ Junot Diaz

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in. ~ Asne Seierstad

It's part of a writer's job to be nosy about everything. ~ Sara Sheridan

There's a need to perfect things in a writers' room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It's a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something. ~ Louis C.K.

I love revisions ... We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest. ~ Katherine Paterson

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure. ~ Peter Ackroyd

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good. ~ Raymond Chandler

I think without writing I would feel completely useless. ~ Sam Shepard

Writing is when I fly, writing is when I start fires. Writing is when I take death out of my left pocket, throw him against the wall and catch him as he bounces back. ~ Charles Bukowski

Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows. ~ Stephen Sondheim

Dear Beloved woman,
Time ... so much time has passed since my love wrote his last words for me.
And yet I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember writing back and for the first time since I had left home I told my love what kind of darkness surrounded me here. I forgot all the sweet things my father had said to my mother when he was away. I forgot how they got her through all those long and lonely nights. ~ Talon P.S.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing. ~ Steve Toltz

I'd hate to be a writer forever and never perform, and I'd hate to perform and not write. I get sad if time has passed and I haven't written or made anything. I'm an artist. ~ Kristen Schaal

I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o'clock every day. ~ William Faulkner

Whatever your dreams may be, never dismiss them as impossible. Always hope. Always try. You just never know when things will happen. ~ Joanne Van Leerdam

I actually enjoy writing longer books because you have even more to get your storytelling teeth into. ~ Stephen Cole

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring. ~ Jules Renard

I hate writing. I almost never write. I write against deadlines. And when I'm teaching, I'm focused on that. ~ Edmund White

The assignment was a two-page essay, in Greek, on any epigram of Callimachus that we chose. I'd done only a page and I started to hurry through the rest in impatient and slightly dishonest fashion, writing out the English and translating word by word. It was something Julian asked us not to do. The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one's head, it taught one to think in Greek. One's thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. ~ Donna Tartt