E. B. White Quotes

Left to it's own devices, writing is like weather. It has a drama, a form, a force to it that shapes the day. Just as good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche. There is something very right about simply letting yourself write. And the way to do that is to begin, to begin where you are.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

I'm not thinking when I'm writing, 'How's this going to read?' Or, 'What percentage of the audience is going to stay with me?' The thing itself is what gives me pleasure. Sometimes stuff just falls onto the page so beautifully and happily that it's deeply satisfying. It's selfish!

You can't wait for someone to give you a show. That can't be the first time you're writing and drawing a character.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

When I do write, it happens really easily. I'll just kind of sing along to whatever I'm playing, then find a line to build off of, then sit down and write. When I do write, I take care of business!

I'm an artist. Artists don't need permission to work. Regardless of whether I'm acting or not, I write. I write when I'm tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.

When I'm writing, I'm just in it and trying to figure out what seems best.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

For as long as I can remember, I was always creating random characters.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

I continue to write. It's just one of those things that I do. I'll have periods when I write and periods when I don't. But you don't want it to become a discipline really. If it becomes a discipline, it becomes a chore and that's no good.

I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.

I'm often just writing just to write. I'm not writing with...If I write, like, sitting down with a goal in mind, it's always, like, the worst. It turns into a ska song even if I'm trying to write like a horror movie sound track or something.

I try not to take on the weight or the burden of it. Once it's on the paper, I try to leave it, because I want to surrender to what I'm supposed to write about.

I have a process that I seem to always, to some degree, as a writer, adhere to, but I certainly have never imposed the way I write a novel on my students. When I had students, I never said, "You should never start writing a novel until you have the last sentence." I never did that, and I wouldn't do it now, but people now seem so interested in the process [of writing fiction] that I have to constantly make it clear when I describe mine that I'm not being prescriptive. I'm not proselytizing.

I'm writing for the sake of writing music. Whether it gets heard or not isn't an issue for me. It keeps my own juices going and my mind active.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.

Read as much as you can. Write only when you feel the inner need to do so. And don’t ever rush into print.