Writing Quotes

Each song is a child I nourish and give my love to. But even if you have never written a song, your life is a song. How can it not be?

I'm a Loser,' 'Help,' 'Strawberry Fields,' they are all personal records. I always wrote about me when I could. I didn't really enjoy writing third person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things like that. I like first person music. But because of my hang-ups and many other things; I would only now and then specifically write about me.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Not one word, not one gesture of yours shall I, could I, ever forget.

Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.

Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.

I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.