Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. — E. L. Doctorow
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. — Walter Benjamin
Producing writing is not so much like filling a basin or pool once, but rather getting water to keep flowing through till finally it runs clear. — Peter Elbow
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden
Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process. — Sydney Pollack
Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. — Louise Brooks
Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story. — Roberta Gellis
Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat. — Dorothy Parker
Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you. — Charles Ghigna
Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is. — Dick Guindon
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. — Helen Dunmore
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen. — Lee Iacocca
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying. — John Updike
My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection. — Ryszard Kapuscinski
Writing is easy. Just sit in front of a typewriter, open up a vein and bleed it out drop by drop. — Red Smith
Short Writing Process Quotes
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. — Mary Heaton Vorse
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. — Stephen King
You need to know a little about a lot to write a book. The amount of research that goes into it- it's just not the ideas that come out of your head. You need to have specifics and 80,000 words. — James Murray
Lyric writing is an interesting process in Sonic Youth. There's three people writing now, and we've all had a lot of interest and involvement with expression through words — Thurston Moore
If you can believe it, I wrote all of 'Awakened' around one chapter. That was the idea for the whole thing, so I figured out what happened that led to this and then where it went from there. — James Murray
I think that in the process of writing, all kinds of unexpected things happen that shift the poet away from his plan and that these accidents are really what we mean when we talk about poetry. — John Ashbery
The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously. — Agnes De Mille
I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one. — Farley Mowat
I like the process of pencil and paper as opposed to a machine. I think the writing is better when it's done in handwriting. — Nelson Demille
Writing Process Image Quotes
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's book and write your own.
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
Today I will go out with the flow of life and trust the process. I will not stress over things I can't control.
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 most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
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
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom. — Charles Spurgeon
You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice. — Bob Marley
Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game. — Voltaire
It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action. — Fidel Castro
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.
It doesn't matter how strong your opinions are. If you don't use your power for positive change, you are, indeed, part of the problem. — Coretta Scott King
Never make a permanent decision based on a temporary storm.. No matter how raging the billows are today, remind yourself: "This too shall pass!" — T. D. Jakes
As no one else can know how we perceive, we are the best experts on ourselves. — Carl Rogers
Sometimes I think creativity is magic; it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you. — Maya Lin
People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. — Harlan Ellison
The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real, for a moment at least, that long magic moment before we wake. — George R. R. Martin
Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. — Stephen King
At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night. — H. P. Lovecraft
The world is a better place because of Margot. Let us remember and give thanks for Margot, her brilliant mind, her loving heart, her beautiful voice, her activism, her writings, her news reporting, her other works, her magic, her bright spirit. — Selena Fox
Accept failure as part of the process.
There is something magical about putting a problem in writing. It is almost as though by writing about what is wrong, you start to discover new ways of making it right. — Jim Rohn
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. — Stephen King
The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced. — Robin McKinley
Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter. — Robert Cormier
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
Write hard and clear about what hurts.
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
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
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
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art — Salvador Dali
We did not begin the creative process by talking about the bottom line. — Bernard Arnault
A number of years ago, when I had an exhibition of my work, the people in charge who came to pick up my manuscripts saw them piled up haphazardly in the garage and were shocked. — Akira Toriyama
Be clear about your goal but be flexible about the process of achieving it.
In manga, nothing actually moves, and you just have to draw the poses in each panel, but in anime, you have to draw the movements between those poses. — Akira Toriyama
Part of the process of letting go is releasing any thoughts of how you or your piece will be received. When making art, the audience comes last. Let’s not consider how a piece will be received or a release strategy until the work is finished and we love it. — Rick Rubin
If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist. — Rick Rubin
Your life is your story. Write well. Edit often.
A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. — James Joyce
Whether we are poets or parents or teachers or artists or gardeners, we must start where we are and use what we have. In the process of creation and relationship, what seems mundane and trivial may show itself to be a holy, precious part of a pattern. — Luci Shaw
Tagore once said - art has to be beautiful, but, before that, it has to be truthful. Now, what is truth? There is no eternal truth. Every artist has to learn private truth though a painful private process. And that is what he has to convey. — Ritwik Ghatak
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. — Marcel Duchamp
Creative Process Quotes
Situations emerge in the process of creative destruction in which many firms may have to perish that nevertheless would be able to live on vigorously and usefully if they could weather a particular storm. — Joseph A. Schumpeter
I tried different techniques during my career, but I especially fell in love with painting with oil and pallette-knife. Every artwork is the result of long painting process; every canvas is born during the creative search; every painting is full of my inner world. — Leonid Afremov
I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking — Albert Einstein
Science is a creative process. It requires imagination, the ability to connect dots that maybe other people haven't connected before. — Jennifer Doudna
By peace we mean the capacity to transform conflicts with empathy, without violence, and creatively- a never-ending process — Johan Galtung
The method of producing comics in Japan is very hectic, but it's also rewarding because it's possible to do both the story and art all by yourself. — Akira Toriyama
Colombia plebiscite result is setback, but process will go on. Time to go to balcony- be creative. Main thing is everyone agrees to end war. — William Ury
Involve groups in the creative process and you inevitably end up with a pile of pleasing lies. — Naval Ravikant
Give your difference, welcome my difference, unify all difference in the larger whole - such is the law of growth. The unifying of difference is the eternal process of life - the creative synthesis, the highest act of creation, the at-onement. — Mary Parker Follett
When it comes to the creative process, patience is accepting that the majority of the work we do is out of our control. — Rick Rubin
Writing Life Quotes
We need to have music that contributes to the well-being of the spirit. Music that cradles people's lives and makes things a little easier. That's what I try to do, and what I want to do. You don't want to close the door on hope. — Merle Haggard
You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing. — Richard P. Feynman
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
I write ... in order to help ensure that the teeming millions in the New World, for whose sins Christ gave His life, do not continue to die in ignorance, but rather are brought to knowledge of God and thereby saved. — Bartolome de las Casas
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. — Victor Hugo
I am the author of my life. Unfortunately, I am writing in pen and can’t erase my mistakes. — Bill Kaulitz
To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard. — Allen Ginsberg
I think that every decision I make in my life is based off of an emotion - and it definitely hurts me in some situations, and helps in some situations, like obviously writing and stuff is my favourite thing to do because I get to use all of my emotions and express them in that way. — Melanie Martinez
She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste. — Julio Cortazar
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's books and write your own. — Albert Einstein
Writing A Book Quotes
I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It's not so bad. I am really lucky. — Gene Wilder
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison
It's always hard to wrap up a series. The longer I spend with the characters, the more they become like friends. — Rick Riordan
In Great Britain, an author published a book in which he claimed that Jesus Christ had children. Such statements don't trigger civil unrest and bloodshed in Europe. But write similar statements about Islam in Syria and you might see bloody uprisings. — Bashar al-Assad
What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature! — Charles Darwin
There are a couple of carp fishing books I've been reading. I'm very interested in that line of books, because I think they write very well, carp anglers, about the general environment. — Tom Felton
I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished. — Haruki Murakami
I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise. — Richard Brautigan
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses. — Aime Cesaire
Writing Workshop Quotes
I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion. — Tobias Wolff
I did not go to any creative writing workshop; I did not major in literature. If I can write, anyone can write. All it needs is imagination. — Vikas Swarup
I got out of college and I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State. I was working as an actor at the Actor's Workshop, being abused as a intern. — Peter Coyote
I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer. — Dennis Lehane
I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago. — Amanda Hocking
As against having beautiful workshops, studies, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day. — Van Wyck Brooks
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring. — Marilyn Hacker
You don't teach information in a writing workshop. — Tobias Wolff
The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations. — Sandra Cisneros
The ideal for me is to mix it up. When I have a writing workshop, I like to have people that are anthropologists and people who are poking around in other fields, I like to have them all in the same workshop, and not worry about genre. — Sandra Cisneros
Being A Writer Quotes
I'm not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that's more what entertainment and music should be. — Chris Cornell
I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. — Walter Cronkite
I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork. — Peter De Vries
You may not be good at hand-to-hand sales, but you may be a really good writer. — Naval Ravikant
The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day. — Robert De Niro
If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. — Louis L'Amour
Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive. — Marya Mannes
Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings. — Stevie Nicks
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better. — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual. — Rita Mae Brown
I shall not be deterred by people who don't see where the future of Africa lies. It is the short-sighted people who put their opinions in writing. They don't understand that the future of all countries lies in processing. — Yoweri Museveni
The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature. — Paul De Man
Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before. — James Newton Howard
And I've always loved commercials. I like working out how to organically weave a brand's message into the writing process. It's like an improv show, where comics ask the audience to throw out a word and a skit is built around it. — Jason Bateman
Life 1.0: life where both the hardware and software are evolved rather than designed. You and I, on the other hand, are examples of Life 2.0: life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed. By your software, I mean all the algorithms and knowledge that you use to process the information from your senses and decide what to do—everything from the ability to recognize your friends when you see them to your ability to walk, read, write, calculate, sing and tell jokes. — Max Tegmark
My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes. — Robert Bly
After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more. — Jasper Fforde
The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I'm just like, 'Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do'. — Eminem
Sometimes you're writing a song and you have an image whilst writing a song. I don't think you ever base a songwriting process around a video, but when you're writing a song sometimes it'll be a very visual song. — Luke Hemmings
For 'The Hotel' I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame...it's the last thought in the process. — Sophie Calle
In the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body. — Jill Bolte Taylor
The writing is therapeutic for me, it's an introverted process, I'm really inside my head. It's a really obsessive process. The live show, though, is the opposite. It's an extroverted process. It pushes me to connect with people, and so it pulls me out of my head and just pulls me out of myself. — Fernando Torres
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing. — George Eliot
You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected. — William Shatner
When I write, I don't allow the fear of consequences to interfere with the writing process. I have in the past paid for my commitment to the truth and the way I live my life. I am prepared to pay more if I have to. — Taslima Nasrin
To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what. — Chris Cornell
I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it. — Marquis De Sade
Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions. — Barack Obama
I think we're always in the process of writing and rewriting the story of our lives, forming our experiences into a narrative that makes sense. Much of that work involves demythologizing family myths and cultural myths - getting free of what we have been told about ourselves. — Sam Keen
Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords. — Christopher Paolini
I have a structured songwriting process. I start with the music and try to come up with musical ideas, then the melody, then the hook, and the lyrics come last. Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about. — John Legend
The most important thing in writing process is the vibe cause if you on a roll, if you feel it you just feel it. And it's all about the atmosphere, the people around you, you know, everything. You got to be clear headed in that and have a perfect atmosphere. — French Montana
When you actually sit down to write some code, you learn things that you didn't get from thinking about them in modeling terms...there is a feedback process there that you can only really get at from executing some things and seeing what works — Martin Fowler
The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning. — A. B. Yehoshua
I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer. — Ricky Schroder
The immediacy of the technology of the web allows us, as songwriters, to write something very sharp and quick. That has a lot to do with helping a songwriter be more reflective of reality, instead of being in an area where you have to process things. It's the difference between processing fish and catching it in a boat. — Chuck D
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream. — Doris Lessing
This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are. — Terry Brooks
The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel - one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. — Steve Jobs
In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better. — Doris Lessing
I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines. — Neil Patrick Harris
In Conclusion
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