Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!"
"You can't do something that is morally vacuous or dysfunctional and then write it off saying, 'It wasn't my film, I was just doing a job in it.'"
"There's always a source for humor [in politics]. If it's inappropriate to write about, if there's nothing funny about it, then it's not funny. So it sort of selects itself. It has to. And plus, often something that wouldn't be funny at the time is okay to make jokes about later."
"A new regulation for the publishing industry: "The advance for a book must be larger than the check for the lunch at which it was discussed."
"Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and inspiring you to answer them for yourself."
"Because I write fiction that is based in the real world, it's going to lead people into some of the modern dilemmas and concerns and even catastrophes that they will think about in a new way."
"This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address."
"I couldn't write a song to save my life. I wouldn't say that I started to panic, but I was definitely getting frustrated. I couldn't even cross a t or dot an i."
"Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. Words and pictures have a continuing struggle for primacy. In my mind, a person can write the best story in the world; but a photograph is absolute."
"Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think."
"I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music."
"Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult."
"A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
"I paint and I draw and I write and I do other things too, and recently some people at school were asking if I'd ever publish any of my work. But I almost feel like I would have to publish it under another name because there's a definition of me out there that feels kind of stuck in the moment when it was formed."
"I really want to write a novel. I also want to learn to play the mandolin."
"I wish I gardened. I don't have a space for a garden. I'm in an apartment in New York but I do lots of stuff. I read and write and hang out with people. I go see movies."
"There is no rule on how to write."
"All bad writers are in love with the epic."
"You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it."
"There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing."
