Professional Writing Quotes

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

I think it's the real world. The people we're writing about in professional sports, they're suffering and living and dying and loving and trying to make their way through life just as the brick layers and politicians are.

People think I live here on Nantucket and just gaze at the ocean, getting my inspiration. Not so. I work in my basement and gaze out onto a single window that shows me a cement wall. This is a profession, and it's important to have professionalism about the writing.

In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.

I think some of the best sex writing is going to come from the unexpected sources, not the same old same old. Like I'd love to see a memoir by a submissive man, because we've seen one from a professional submissive and dommes and strippers and hookers. I'd love to see more men writing frankly, not jokingly, about sex.

Writing a class without its contract would be similar to producing an engineering component (electrical circuit, VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip, bridge, engine...) without a spec. No professional engineer would even consider the idea.

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal.

Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children.

But they remain your co-authors forever.

What I adore is supreme professionalism.

I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

I've been a professional athlete, I've directed films, I've run a company with 150 employees, and nothing compares to writing a screenplay. Just the second I think I know what I'm doing, the rug gets pulled out and I have no idea what I'm doing. Because there are so many problems to solve.

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.

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

Sometimes things you write are messages to yourself.

Even though I think my stuff has a particular voice because you are who you are, it's good to switch it up, professionally and personally. The dare to be great situation is always going to be the one that matters the most.

My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy.

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw the main Hellboy comic. He's so much mine. But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to someone else. That character is my baby.

In certain areas I don't function well and in other areas I function very well.

I'm very good professionally. I have good discipline, I'm able to write every day and do films and not go six times over the budget. I mean I'm a coherent person, but I also don't like to go through tunnels when I travel. I'm claustrophobic.

I suppose my professional life can be split into writing books that all sound like infomercial products, most notably 'The 4-Hour Workweek,' and then tech investing.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work.

I've been writing plays since the third grade.

The biggest difference now is that professionals act in them rather than eight year olds...and the language is a bit more "colorful".

I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter.

But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music.

It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it.

Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true.

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

My passion is writing comics and storytelling, and I'm constantly working to improve. I hit my deadlines, I know how to work with and artists, I'm professional, and I bring my A-game every time.

The whole time I was writing, I had to fight my normal inclination to be funny, to sort of patch humor in, in order to convey all of the disruptions of the disease to the family dynamic, the loss of individuality, the impact on professional life, and the sanity of the main character. Of course, that's not to say it never sneaks in; there's some black comedy in there, like when he shows up to court wearing a bicycle helmet and won't take it off.

There will be this mix of people like me who write for major national newspapers and amateur critics, practitioner critics, whose primary way of distributing what they talk about is through blogs and on the web. The line between professional and amateur criticism will become increasingly blurred. The problem here is that if you want to do this for a living, you have to be able to earn a living doing it.

For me, writing started as pleasure that became professionalized, so my relationship to it is a bit sullied. I'm working it out.

An artist doesn't depend upon inspiration or have to have it.

An artist doesn't depend on mood, certainly not if you're earning your living with it. One of the definitions of a professional is you can do some writing if you have to, even in the most extreme situations.

I guess it must be a time-of-life thing, looking back and trying to make some sense of who I am and where I've been. It's a weird thing, having to give an account of yourself, to try to make sense of yourself for yourself. I'm not that old, but I have been writing fiction professionally for a long time now. I started so young and went so hard for so long. And I guess it was about feeling I had the space to look over my shoulder.

Once I became an adult and started to pursue writing as a professional career, I realized my main characters were always young people. My stories naturally center around children and teenagers. I think it's because I have worked with youth for about twelve years. The pains and joys of adolescents are moments I witness on a daily basis, so their stories are always with me as I write.

I had this idea about terrible things happening to orphans, and I knew it was such a horrible idea that the idea of writing it down and then submitting it professionally was obviously absurd.