Writing quotes

Writing

30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

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Writing quotes (page 107 of 1537)

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Alan Watts Philosopher, Writer
Writing

"The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales."

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Alastair Campbell Political Consultant, Author
Writing

"I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity."

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Albert Camus Philosopher, Writer
Writing

"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."

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Albert Camus Philosopher, Writer
Writing

"We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so."

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Aldous Huxley Novelist, Essayist
Writing

"If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats."

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Allen Ginsberg Poet, Activist
Writing

"I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence."

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Andre Gide Novelist
Writing

"Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."

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Anne Bronte Author
Writing

"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."

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Anne Lamott Author, Essayist
Writing

"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."

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Anne Lamott Author, Essayist
Writing

"The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out."

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Anton Chekhov Playwright, Short Story Writer
Writing

"Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions."

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Antonin Sertillanges Philosopher
Writing

"Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening."

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