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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"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."
"For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed."
"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."
"Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."
"Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away."
"Sexuality is a topic that has huge shifts in -society. Attitudes toward different sexualities change, but the actual sexuality of a human being is something that's consistent, and it's consistently interesting, and so people write about it."
"I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other."
"I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly."
"On "Tonight" I think I was torn dreadfully between writing what I wanted to write, but keeping it in a style that would follow up what I had just done. That's where I feel I was untrue to myself as an artist . . . that album and, to a lesser extent, "Never Let Me Down.""
"The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about.""
"Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get."
"Siamese twins are interesting because they are the only people who can write a biography and an autobiography at the same time."
"The White House again refused to turn over discussions Vice President Cheney had with Enron officials over energy policy. Cheney said if he had to disclose every time some business donated a ton of money then came in to write its own policy to govern itself, he wouldn't get any work done."
"I don't have the desire to be the best standup in the UK but I do have the desire to be the best at everything else I do in terms of writing and acting."
"Regarding social order, [Francis] Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F. A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century."
"When I'm writing, I'm thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don't translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you."
"I wake up in the morning, walk downstairs, and just bang on the piano and write about what's going on in the world around me."
"The condition of the world today is such that most writers feel they cannot truthfully be "comic" about it."
"If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you."
"Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs."
