114 Professional Writing Quotes
Following is our list of professional writing quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about what are professional.
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Famous Professional Writing Quotes
Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity. — William Zinsser
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant. — Robert McKee
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. — James A. Michener
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. — E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. — Dorothy Parker
Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years. — Alex Haley
One writer, for instance, excels at a plan or a title page, another works away at the body of the book, and a third is a dab at an index. — Oliver Goldsmith
Writing should be an adventure, shrouded in mystery and uncertainty, blessed with amazing grace. In theory, of course — Syd Field
I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will. — Laurell K. Hamilton
A good writer is not someone who knows how to write- but how to rewrite — William Goldman
Writing is not a genteel profession. It's quite nasty and tough and kind of dirty. — Rosemary Mahoney
Every writer I know has trouble writing. — Joseph Heller
There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. — Robert Graves
Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps. — Elizabeth George
Short Professional Writing Quotes
- I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. — Peter De Vries
- Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living. — Harold Pinter
- The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. — Mary Heaton Vorse
- The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it. — Leo Rosten
Professional Writing Image Quotes
What Is Writing Quotes
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come. — Maya Angelou
If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. — Michel Foucault
If someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him. — Keith Green
The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science. They outnumber kids 5 to 1, they wield power, they write legislation. When you have scientifically illiterate adults, you have undermined the very fabric of what makes a nation wealthy and strong. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become. — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
There's a story everywhere. Being bored to death someplace is basically a funny proposition. What you have to watch out for is you don't write a boring story about a boring place. — Tim Cahill
The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it. — Alice Miller
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible. — Arthur Schopenhauer
I write the lyrics based on what is going on in my life - I'm not going to write about the old hair metal stuff, like castles and stuff. — Oliver Sykes
In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal. — Nisami
What Are Professional Quotes
Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it. — Benjamin Graham
If you ask the people who are professional political analysts, they would say that the way redistricting has worked, that the Republicans have something of a lock on the House until a redistricting occurs after 2010, particularly as a result of what DeLay did in Texas. — John Podesta
Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. — Freeman Dyson
New beginnings – professional, personal, or come what may – are always uncomfortable, but being open to them is the only way to grow. In the end, we are all capable of so much more than we think. — Marissa Mayer
The worst days of those who enjoy what they do are better than the best days of those who don't. — Jim Rohn
I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage. — Edward R. Murrow
The irony of that is, what makes it kind of ironic, is when you do become successful as a professional athlete in particular, a lot of the young children who are emulating these stars do have a different perspective. — Frank Shorter
Over 95% of the designers who have ever lived are alive today. Together, we have the power to define what professionalism in the communications industry will be about: helping increase market share or helping repair the World. — David Berman
But we may want to keep in mind that deeds and words are not as distinguishable as often we presume. History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it into their own hands. — Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Many who are making cellphone images are advocates with a stake in the outcome of what they are depicting. In some ways this makes their work more honest and easier to read - they can also manipulate, although the work of professionals can be quite manipulative as well. — Fred Ritchin
Business Writing Quotes
In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game. — Anita Brookner
One way we gave small businesses more money to invest was by extending tax provisions on expensing. This allows businesses to immediately write off things like equipment, without being burdened by depreciation requirements. — Dennis Hastert
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business. — John Steinbeck
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information. — Irvine Welsh
For businesses, biomimicry is about bringing a new discipline - biology - to the design table. It's not to write an environmental impact statement, as most biologists in business do right now. — Janine Benyus
If prisons, freight trains, swamps, and gators don't get ya to write songs, man, y'ain't got no business writin' songs. — Ronnie Van Zant
You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it. — Otis Redding
Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow's business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics. — Walter Russell
Anybody that forms a group, writes songs and releases records and says they don't care if people like them are complete liars. — James Dean Bradfield
Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing. — Steve Blank
Academic Writing Quotes
Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism. — Dave Barry
I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable. — Carlisle Floyd
When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11. — Harrison Birtwistle
I had been writing for about twelve years. I knew pretty well how you could find things out, but I had never been trained in an academic way how to go about the research. — David McCullough
I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time. — Peter Straub
Writing about dead white males seems to be out of favor among academics. — Ron Chernow
It's a good thing that we're protected by tenure and academic freedom, but we should realize that it creates a risk of getting cut off. Scholars should write, at least sometimes, for the general public. — Martha C. Nussbaum
I don't have the notion that everybody has to write in some single academic style — Clifford Geertz
I was pretty dead set against ever writing an academic novel. It's always been my view that there are already more than enough academic novels and that most of them aren't any good. Most of them are self-conscious and bitter, the work of people who want to settle grudges. — Richard Russo
Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about. — Kenneth Koch
Teaching Writing Quotes
Between rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in the language Basic. — Eric Allin Cornell
I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight. — Venerable Bede
You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be. — Mario Vargas Llosa
It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words. — Anthony Doerr
James Franco, acting, teaching, directing, writing, producing, photography, soundtracks, editing - is there anything you can do? — Natasha Leggero
Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers. — Kelly Gallagher
It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest. — Barry Mann
Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market. — John Taylor Gatto
If you are not a writer, you will not understand the difficulties of writing. If you are not a writer, you will not know the fears and hopes of the writers you teach. — Mem Fox
Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. — Bernard Malamud
People Writing About Professional Writing
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 William Zinsser |
132 | 242 |
 Richard Bach |
414 | 5978 |
 Robert McKee |
67 | 296 |
 James A. Michener |
100 | 658 |
 E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White |
37 | 180 |
 Dorothy Parker |
340 | 4622 |
More Professional Writing Quotes
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. — Nathaniel Borenstein
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. — John Dalton
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. — Red Smith
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. — Nathaniel Philbrick
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. — Morris West
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. — Rachel Kramer Bussel
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. — Bertrand Meyer
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. — Hugh Mackay
You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever. — Ellen Goodman
What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining. — Noel Coward
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. — Stacy Peralta
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. — Raymond Chandler
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon. — Robert Benchley
I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic. — Shelley Berman
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. — Cameron Crowe
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. — Mike Mignola
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. — Woody Allen
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. — Tim Ferriss
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. — Fran Lebowitz
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". — Colette Freedman
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. — Ludwig Feuerbach
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. — Alma Guillermoprieto
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. — Ayumi Hamasaki
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. — Elif Shafak
Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer. — Len Deighton
Every historian with professional standards speaks or writes what he believes to be true. — Samuel E. Morison
At this stage, my chief professional goal is simply to keep on writing and making a living at it. — Fred Saberhagen
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. — Hope Larson
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. — Joshua Ferris
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. — Terry Teachout
For me, writing started as pleasure that became professionalized, so my relationship to it is a bit sullied. I'm working it out. — Katrina Onstad
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. — Michael Ventura
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. — Tim Winton
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. — Renee Watson
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. — Daniel Handler
The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre. — Robert Hass
I wasn't one of those kids that was like I'm going to be a country music singer or I'm going to be the next Pat Green and stuff. Hell, I didn't even think it was possible. I wrote to write. It wasn't even a thought in my head that I could do it professionally. — William Clark Green
I had written the script a few years earlier for Paramount, then later got hired with Sam [Fuller] to write an entirely new script that he was going to direct. And that was one of the great thrills of my professional life. — Curtis Hanson
My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer. — Curtis Hanson
I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally. — Curtis Hanson
I spent 10 years in professional politics and eight writing comics, and so I look at it from both sides. I don't understand the logic in being frustrated with a system, so you choose to be a part of the reason why the system is so frustrating. If everybody voted, it wouldn't be this way. — Andrew Aydin
I once had a young musician come to me and say that he wanted to be a professional musician. I asked him to write his list. When he came back to me, the three things in his life he most wanted were: to be paid for his music; to travel around the world; to meet new people. We came to the decision, after thinking really creatively, that if he got a job on a cruise ship, he would fulfill those goals. — Phil Keoghan
Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go. — David B. Coe
I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book. — Beth Revis
I do less of that stuff now because I figured out that when I was writing things I didn't care about, it made me angry and depressed, so I turned my focus to what does make me happy, and also I recognized that one of the things that gives me great happiness is teaching creative writing, and so I could write profiles of professional golfers or I could be a professor. Being a professor made me much happier. — Tod Goldberg
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