Best twenties & writing Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“Writing songs does not get any easier, and that might be because I am harder on myself than I was twenty years ago. Hopefully, as we grow older and change, there are fresh topics, new perspectives, or at least there should be.”

Should Writing Years Doe Might Song Grows Perspective Easier Years Ago Harder Twenties Hopefully Topics Writing Songs New Perspective

Author:Dean Wareham

“I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.”

Writing Firsts Book Happens Five Twenties Expected Thirty

Author:David Sedaris

“My mother had died when I wrote my first book. I was twenty-seven, so it was right at the beginning of my writing life. I don't know if she had lived, if I would have done it, certainly not quite like I did. But, you can't rethink it. You wrote what you wrote, it meant something to other people, and that's your good.”

People Ifs Knows Writing Firsts Book Done Mother Died Twenties Seven Writing Life

Author:Anne Roiphe

“In '94, I started writing a novel about an enormous terrorist act that destroyed the United States. The novel takes place twenty years after this destruction, with all the stuff that we're dealing with now - a dirty war, the disappeared, the concept of terrorism. Anyway, 9/11 happened some years into the process, and I was like, OK, I don't have a novel.”

Writing Years War States Stuff Process United United States Novel Happened Concepts Destruction Twenties Terrorism Terrorist Enormous Destroyed Dirty

Author:Junot Diaz

“I mean when the book first came out it was not a bestseller, but it got good reviews and at that point I was done writing about Andy, done talking about Andy....but now, I kind of love it. All these smart, attractive young people think I'm cool! So here I am a guy in his sixties with all of these interesting friends in their twenties. It's very stimulating and keeps me very much in the present.”

People Thinking Writing Firsts Kind Mean Book Done Young Guy Interesting Talking Smart Twenties Attractive Reviews Sixty Here I Am Kinds Of Love

Author:Bob Colacello

“I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.”

Way Feels Writing Self Enough Dream Seeing Perspective Protect Twenties Distance Younger Self

Author:Dani Shapiro

“I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.”

Writing Firsts Book Worst Changed Sick Twenties Illness Decades Accepted Exotic Changed My Life

Author:Judy Blume

“My wife and I are involved in writing/publishing/promotion twenty-four/seven. It isn't a day job; it's life.”

Writing Jobs Four Wife Involved Twenties Seven My Wife Publishing Promotion Day Jobs

Author:Kevin J. Anderson

“While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.”

Writing Two Twenties Cancer Essays Twenty Two Personal Essays

Author:Natalie Goldberg

“When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.”

Writing Trying Years Littles Stills Book Play Seems Novel Poet Couple Pages Hundred Twenties Seven Very Good Determined Nine Novelists Fifteen Nine Years Nineteen Funny Book

Book:Conversations with Edward Albee

Source: Conversations with Edward Albee

“About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.”

“Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.”

“What I'd really like to write is a romantic comedy. This is my favorite kind of movie. I feel almost embarrassed revealing this, because the genre has been so degraded in the past twenty years that saying you like romantic comedies is essentially an admission of mild stupidity.”

Feels Writing Years Kind Has Beens Past Comedy Romantic Twenties My Favorite Stupidity Genre Romantic Love Embarrassed Revealing Admission

Author:Mindy Kaling

“I've been writing short stories for twenty years now, on and off ever since I was in the creative writing program at San Francisco State University.”

Writing Years States Stories Creative Program Twenties University Short Story Creative Writing San Francisco And Off Writing Short Writing Short Stories

Author:Andrew Lam

“The thing is - do we really need another writer who writes a book every eighteen months, whether the quality is wonderful or not? I mean, maybe. But I can name twenty off the top of my head who do it. Maybe what we need is a writer like me who goes very slow, as well.”

Needs Writing Wells Mean I Can Book Names Quality Wonderful Months Twenties Like Me Eighteen

Author:Junot Diaz

“I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.”

Writing Book Talking Taught England Twenties Fellows University Backgrounds Fifteen Thrilling Matthew Birmingham

Author:John Shelby Spong

“Distinguish between the work and the job title. When I was leaving school in the early 1970s, many people wanted to be journalists, carrying out investigative reporting for print newspapers. Print newspapers may not exist in twenty years. But good thinking and good writing about issues that need to be reported and investigated will always be needed; but where this happens, what it is called, and who pays for it may be quite different than could have been envisioned by the great journalists of the past.”

“In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally.”

People Way Needs Writing Firsts Ends Courses Winning Forget Interesting Novel Century Majors Twenties Novelists Latter Prize Judged New Ways Very Interesting Nineteenth Century Assessing

Author:Pankaj Mishra

“In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.”

Thinking Needs Writing Years Mean Twenties Selflessness

Author:Alice Munro

“I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.”

Writing Age Wanted Young Conscious Ideals Twenties Young Age

Author:Joyce Carol Oates

“Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.”

Writing Years Book School Law Three Father Twenties Urges Law School

Author:Susan Orlean

“It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.”

Writing Book Novel Twenties Selling Symphony Wrestler Alligators Banjos

Author:Karen Russell

“I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.”

Writing Years Firsts Book Twenties Seventeen

Author:David Sedaris

“Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.”

Source: The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928

“Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”

“When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.”

“I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.”

Knows Writing Mean Book Dream Hands Natural Lines Opinion Five Twenties Seeking Symbols Vain Compare Regions Customs Application Librarian Inventor Chaotic Twenty Five Superstitious

Book:Ficciones

Source: Ficciones

“Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?”

Source: The Things They Carried

“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I could have had an accident or died; a war or a revolution could have broken out. This delay makes it possible for me to write today, in the same way I used to lie in the scorching sun for a whole day at sixteen, or make love wihout contraceptives at twenty: without thinking about the consequences”

Source: Simple Passion

“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.”

Source: A Gathering Light

“There!" Mars finished writing and threw the scroll at Octavian. "A prophecy. You can add it to your books, engrave it on the floor, whatever." Octavian read the scroll. "This says, 'Go to Alaska. Find Thanatos and free him. Come back by sundown on June twenty-fourth or die'." "Yes," Mars said. "Is that not clear?" "Well, my lord...usually prophecies are unclear. They're wrapped in riddles. They rhyme, and..." Mars casually popped another grenade off his belt. "Yes?" "The prophecy is clear!" Octavian announced. "A quest!”

Writing Wells Said Book Dies Lord Clear Twenties Add Finished Fourth Quests Mars Prophecy Rhyme Belts June Alaska Riddle Grenade Unclear Thanatos Engrave Octavian

Author:Rick Riordan

“This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!”

“I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.”

“Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.”

Writing Jobs Nice Taught Twenties Odd Ashamed Realising Introvert Writing Life Nineteen Outgoing Extroverts

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin

“Here look at me. I'm Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I'm a mathematical whiz, and I'm writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me long after I'm gone.”

Writing Looks Long Book Remember Asks Speak Language Gone Son Tests Twenties Blame Mathematical Ask Me Piano Fixed Look At Me Charlie Here I Am Remember Me

Book:Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“Newton took no exercise, indulged in no amusements, and worked incessantly, often spending eighteen or nineteen hours out of the twenty-four in writing.”

Writing Science Hours Four Hard Work Exercise Twenties Spending Amusement Newton Eighteen Nineteen Incessantly

Book:A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

Source: A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

“When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.”

“Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an atomic bomb. You know the ones: Was, did, had, made, went, looked... One-size-fits-all looks like crap on anyone. Sew yourself a custom made suit. Pick a better verb. Challenge all those verbs to really lift some weight for you.”

People Knows Writing Looks Made Use Running Challenges Fit Picks Weight Twenties Size Suits Lifts Bombs Customs Crap Explosions Verbs Atomic Bomb Stockings One Size Fits All

Author:Janet Fitch

“Twenty-seven people sang 'Wind Beneath My Wings' before I got around to it. A lot of people saw the movie that I sang it in, Beaches, and what they came away with was that song. They turned to their loved ones and said, 'You know, you are the wind beneath my wings!' The song expressed how they felt in a way a simple 'I love you' would not have.”

People Knows Way Writing Said Song Felt Simple Saws Love You Wind Twenties Wings Seven Beach Songwriting Loved Ones

Author:Bette Midler

“You will achieve grand dream, a day at a time, so set goals for each day - not long and difficult projects, but chores that will take you, step by step, toward your rainbow. Write them down, if you must, but limit your list so that you won't have to drag today's undone matters into tomorrow. Remember that you cannot build your pyramid in twenty-four hours. Be patient. Never allow your day to become so cluttered that you neglect your most important goal - to do the best you can, enjoy this day, and rest satisfied with what you have accomplished.”

“Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don't know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk--or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I'm not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you'd think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.”

Source: Where She Went

“My twenties were a write-off. It's a cruel illness, because you can't see it and you can hide it so well.”

Writing Wells Depression Twenties Illness Mental Illness

Author:Sarah Lancashire

“Openness by the leader paves the way for ownership by the people. Without ownership, changes will be short term. Changing people's habits and ways of thinking is like writing instructions in the snow during a snowstorm. Every twenty minutes the instructions must be rewritten, unless ownership is given along with instructions.”

People Thinking Way Writing Given Term Leadership Leader Minutes Habit Twenties Snow Openness Instruction Ownership Short Term Way Of Thinking Snowstorms

Book:Developing the Leader Within You

Source: Developing the Leader Within You

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