Writing famous quotes

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.
-- A. A. Milne

#Success #Writing #Fame

If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.
-- A. A. Milne

#Writing #Play #History

This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.
-- A. A. Milne

#Silly #Writing #Stuff

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
-- A. A. Milne

#Writing #Letters #Spelling

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
-- A. B. Yehoshua

#Writing #Complicated #Process

Because of a friend, life is a little stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be near or far. If the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away he still is there to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to share life and experience with, to serve, to honor, to admire, to love.
-- A. C. Benson

#Life #Writing #Thinking

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more.
-- A. E. Hotchner

#Flower #Writing #Two

He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
-- A. E. Hotchner

#Reading #Writing #Typewriters

Nature, not content with denying him the ability to think, has endowed him with the ability to write.
-- A. E. Housman

#Sarcastic #Writing #Thinking

I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.
-- A. E. van Vogt

#Writing #Way #Months

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.
-- A. E. van Vogt

#Writing #Years #Ideas

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.
-- A. E. van Vogt

#Writing #People #Looks

I’m not a fan of ‘write what you know.’ If you don’t know, find out. I knew nothing about the Bible before I started writing ‘The Year of Living Biblically.’ That was kind of the point – to learn.
-- A. J. Jacobs

#Writing #Years #Fans

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite.
-- A. J. Liebling

#Writing #Culinary #Appetite

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
-- A. J. Liebling

#Witty #Humorous #Writing

I can write better than anyone who can write faster,
-- A. J. Liebling

#Writing #Faster

If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.
-- A. J. Liebling

#Writing #Pay #Firsts

The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
-- A. J. Liebling

#Writing #Impossible #Eating

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.
-- A. J. Liebling

#Writing #Way #Wells

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.
-- A. J. P. Taylor

#Loyalty #Mistake #Writing

Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.
-- A. Lee Martinez

#Writing #Waiting #Waiter

If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.
-- A. M. Rosenthal

#Writing #Swagger #Stories

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Queens #Book #Writing

I don't write books inadvertently.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Book #Writing

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Writing #Thinking #People

If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Inspirational #Writing #Annoyed

Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Writing #Shadow #Feels

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.
-- A. N. Wilson

#Book #Writing #Years

For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.
-- A. P. Herbert

#Writing #Tonight #World

Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.
-- A. S. Byatt

#Writing #Ink #Hops

Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
-- A. S. Byatt

#Reading #Writing #Stones

Freedom of discussion is in England little else than the right to write or say anything which a jury of twelve shopkeepers think it expedient should be said or written.
-- A. V. Dicey

#Writing #Thinking #Insulting

The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.
-- A. Whitney Brown

#Writing #Past #History

I am putting together a secular bible. My Genesis is when the apple falls on Newton's head.
-- A.C. Grayling

#Fall #Writing #Science

Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.
-- A.L. Kennedy

#Inspiring #Writing #Humility

Remember you love writing.  It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t.  If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back,
-- A.L. Kennedy

#Writing #Needs #Remember

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.
-- A.L. Kennedy

#Writing #Self #Black

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
-- A.M. Homes

#Book #Writing #Break

The language itself is what gets me interested in writing. It's weird to me that words exist. Never a dull moment with words. They're a layer between our minds and the physical reality around us, obviously, but the layer seems like it's always in flux, like an asteroid belt, constantly moving.
-- Aaron Belz

#Moving #Writing #Reality

Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems.
-- Aaron Belz

#Stars #Writing #Play

I don't really want to write fiction at all. I don't see why fiction is necessary when we have real life already confusing enough.
-- Aaron Belz

#Real #Writing #Confusing

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
-- Aaron Belz

#Teaching #Writing #Ideas

After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There's something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.
-- Aaron Belz

#Laughter #Reading #Writing

I write about my feelings, things that happen in my life and experiences.
-- Aaron Carter

#Writing #Feelings

Letters, from absent friends, extinguish fear, Unite division, and draw distance near; Their magic force each silent wish conveys, And wafts embodied though, a thousand ways: Could souls to bodies write, death's pow'r were mean, For minds could then meet minds with heav'n between.
-- Aaron Hill

#Distance #Mean #Writing

My resting pulse as a writer is writing idealistically and romantically; aspirationally. My taste lies in quixotic heroes.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Lying #Hero #Writing

When you're writing a movie or a play and writing isn't going well, which is for me the normal condition - it's an exceptional day when suddenly I've got something and it's going well - you can call the studio or the producer or whoever is waiting for it and say, "I know I said I was going to have it in by the end of the summer.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Summer #Writing #Play

I would love for people to think that I am as quick, clever, smart and heroic as the characters that I write, but those characters are characters.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Clever #Smart #Writing

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Writing #Play #Watches

Honestly, I don't try to guess at what most people want. I don't think I'd guess right, and I just think that that's not a good recipe for storytelling. I try to write what I like, what I think my friends would like.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Writing #Thinking #People

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that's not going to be me.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Writing #Directors #Want

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Hate #Writing #White

You can only write, 'Somebody wants something, something else is in their way of getting it.'
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Writing #Want #Way

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Writing #Eight #Scripts

I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Drama #Writing #Perfection

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.
-- Aaron Sorkin

#Beach #Writing #Hands

A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.
-- Abba Eban

#Writing #Justice #Social Justice

Write every day. Writing is a muscle that gets stronger with use.
-- Abbi Glines

#Writing #Stronger #Use

I'm always writing lyrics. I have so many lyrics on so many stray pieces of paper. Everywhere.
-- Abbie Cornish

#Writing #Pieces #Paper

I never really wanted to write and wanted to focus on acting.
-- Abby Elliott

#Writing #Focus #Acting

There are some different things I'm writing and developing, but I don't know where they'll go. They're fun stuff that I would be in and are written in my voice, for me.
-- Abby Elliott

#Fun #Writing #Voice

The Arab World is writing a new future; the pen is in our own hands.
-- Abdallah II

#Writing #Hands #World

Allah is in Himself the non-being and the being, the inexistent and the existent. He is at the same time that which we designate by absolute non-being and by absolute being; or by relative non-being and relative being. . . . All these designation come back to God alone, for there is nothing which we can perceive, know, write or say which is not Him.
-- Abdelkader El Djezairi

#Time #Writing #Perceive

The calligraphic letter is not entirely a letter, but something that sits between writing and music
-- Abdelkebir Khatibi

#Writing #Letters

With 'New Rose Hotel,' I knew that I was getting paid a $100,000 fee to write, produce, and direct, and that's all I was going to get.
-- Abel Ferrara

#Writing #Rose #Fees

I like English, and I like writing essays, and that kind of stuff.
-- Abigail Breslin

#Writing #Stuff #Kind

The young women of today, free to study, to speak, to write, to choose their occupation, should remember that every inch of this freedom was bought for them at a great price. It is for them to show their gratitude by helping onward the reforms of their own times, by spreading the light of freedom and of truth still wider. The debt that each generation owes to the past it must pay to the future.
-- Abigail Scott Duniway

#Gratitude #Writing #Past

The course of life is unpredictable no one can write his autobiography in advance.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel

#Writing #Life Is #Unpredictable

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
-- Abraham Lincoln

#Art #Distance #Writing

I could write shorter sermons but when I get started I'm too lazy to stop
-- Abraham Lincoln

#Writing #Lazy

Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.
-- Abraham Maslow

#Writing #Artist #Self

Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.
-- Abraham Pais

#Liars #Believe #Writing

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text.
-- Abraham Pais

#Book #Writing

I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again.
-- Abraham Pais

#Morning #Writing #Night

Of course, relative citation frequencies are no measure of relative importance. Who has not aspired to write a paper so fundamental that very soon it is known to everyone and cited by no one?
-- Abraham Pais

#Writing #Fundamentals #Paper

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
-- Abraham Verghese

#Writing #Cutting #Medicine

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
-- Abraham Verghese

#Meaningful #Book #Writing

Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.
-- Ace Antonio Hall

#Drinking #Writing #Finishing

I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.
-- Achmat Dangor

#Art #Writing #Fighting

You don't really know a woman until she writes you a letter.
-- Ada Leverson

#Writing #Letters

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.
-- Adam Brody

#Writing #Acting #Best Acting

I love movie-making. I'm interested in writing and directing, and I've dabbled, but I haven't done anything I care to brag about. Yet.
-- Adam Brody

#Writing #Movie Love #Done

I thought writing about somebody current would be a little closer to what I'm used to doing.
-- Adam Clymer

#Writing #Would Be #Littles

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.
-- Adam Clymer

#Morning #Book #Writing

I actually run a non-profit where one of the main objectives is to branch out and get a new audience for the theater. Just because the writing is so good and nothing is more effective than seeing something live and happening right in front of your face, so I definitely want to continue to pursue that.
-- Adam Driver

#Running #Writing #Branches

I had a financial page to write in the Mail on Sunday where Id give tips on shares. I worked there for two and a half years. Nothing compares to the burst of energy felt on a newsroom floor when a big story breaks.
-- Adam Faith

#Writing #Sunday #Years

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
-- Adam Gopnik

#Art #Writing #Ideas

Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions - adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers - none can equal the Internet.
-- Adam Gopnik

#Father #Writing #Alcohol

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
-- Adam Gopnik

#Writing #Winning #Your Side

Writing well isn't just a question of winsome expression, but of having found something big and true to say and having found the right words to say it in, of having seen something large and having found the right words to say it small, small enough to enter an individual mind so that the strong ideas of what the words are saying sound like sweet reason.
-- Adam Gopnik

#Sweet #Strong #Writing

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.
-- Adam Gopnik

#Sex #Writing #Self

Big writers become a kind of shared climate.
-- Adam Gopnik

#Writing #Climate #Kind

So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.
-- Adam Kirsch

#Writing #Intelligent #Answers

After my tour I had time to stay at home, be with my boyfriend and hang out with friends and that brought me down to earth and helped me write music from a more relaxed place.
-- Adam Lambert

#Home #Writing #My Boyfriend

It's a really big struggle for me to write a song. Songs take either 30 seconds for me to write or a year or two to piece together, depending on the song and how I'm feeling on any given day. I don't really like to write music at all unless I am completely unbothered by touring.
-- Adam Levine

#Song #Struggle #Writing

I play in a band, I write songs, I sing, you know, perform on stage.
-- Adam Levine

#Song #Writing #Play

You know, sometimes I get moments of inspiration when I'm writing something and then the task seems so daunting that it just kind of scares me away.
-- Adam Pascal

#Inspiration #Writing #Scare

One of the tricks to writing great plays is to get people in a room together and not let them leave. You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.
-- Adam Rapp

#Writing #Play #People

I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.
-- Adam Rapp

#Dog #Fall #Writing

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.
-- Adam Rapp

#Real #Book #Writing