Writing Quotes Quotes

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

Writing is a crummy profession, but a good hobby.

Paavo Haavikko

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
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