John Osborne Quotes

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

I'm inspired by whatever I see, feel, hear about, watch on the TV...anything. It can be something that I really need to get off my chest so I write or something a friend is going through which gets my thoughts going.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

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

I began to write when I was seven, and I have been writing off and on ever since. It is still off and on. You can say that when I am on, when I know I have a book which I am going to write, then I write two thousand words a day. That's so many pages longhand.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

If you want to write, keep cats.

What do I do when writing isn't going well? Well, I don't write - which is symptom, cure, and cause. And then sometimes I just tell myself, as I'm writing, "I'll fix it later." And sometimes it's true, I do.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

To write, you have to know how to act and know about directing. To act, you also need to know how to write and direct.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

I try not to write more than two or three, I try to just write one if possible, I write till the end at least a draft of a play or a novel; but sometimes, I'll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I write lyrics everyday as I go. I'm always taking notes in my phone whenever I am inspired by something. Most of my writing starts out as poetry before I put it into songs.

My job is to get people to write something truthful, something about truth and beauty - wherever they are - and to understand how literature is made. And then if they become great writers, that's great, and probably has nothing to do with me.

Writing is only a guided dream.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

I've always had a great love of music since childhood. It changes every day.. every time you write, it's a new experience. It's a self expression.

The things that have always drawn me to the craft of writing is character, it's story, it's something that becomes like a pebble in my shoe, a voice that I just can't get rid of, and I've got to see it through.