Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories."
"In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author."
"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art."
"Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them."
"Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised."
"I would like all my friends, followers, fans and fellow travelers to know that I am fighting cancer and will therefore be taking a break from performing while getting the treatment and cure. I shall of course be continuing to write music - in my world it just has to be part of the therapy - and I fully expect to be back in good shape next year."
"The best Maxim I know in this life is, to drink your Coffee when you can, and when you cannot, to be easy without it. While you continue to be splenetic, count upon it I will always preach. Thus much I sympathize with you that I am not cheerful enough to write, for I believe Coffee once a week is necessary to that."
"Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting."
"The two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don't think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don't like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow."
"What a writer wants to do is not what he does."
"I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it."
"For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this."
"If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
"Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off."
"Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
"The voice is a human sound which nothing inanimate can perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an insinuating property which writing lacks. It is not merely so much air, but air modulated and impregnated with life."
"Before you use a fancy word, make room for it."
"It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either."
"Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopeless ly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us."
"I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily."
