Writing is the only trade I know of in which sniveling confessions of extreme incompetence are taken as credentials probative of powers to astound the multitude.
George V. Higgins
That folk music led to learning to play, and making things up led to what turns out to be the most lucrative part of the music business - writing, because you get paid every time that song gets played.
Jackson Browne
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
Eliot, T. S.
Getting ahead in a difficult profession - singing, acting, writing, whatever requires avid faith in yourself. You must be able to sustain yourself against staggering blows and unfair reversals. When I think back to those first couple of years in Rome, those endless rejections, without a glimmer of encouragement from anyone, all those failed screen tests, and yet I never let my desire slide away from me, my belief in myself and what I felt I could achieve
Sophia Loren
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Anonymous
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once
Cyril Connolly
It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson
Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.
John Szarkowski
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington
If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.
William Zinsser
Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.
Monica Dickens
When I find someone I respect writing about an edgy, nervous wine that dithered in the glass, I cringe. When I hear someone I don't respect talking about an austere, unforgiving wine, I turn a bit austere and unforgiving myself. When I come across stuff like that and remember about the figs and bananas, I want to snigger uneasily. You can call a wine red, and dry, and strong, and pleasant. After that, watch out.
Kingsley Amis
Since writing JAWS, I've been lucky enough to do close to forty television shows about wildlife in the oceans, and yes, I have been attacked by sea creatures once in a while.
Peter Benchley