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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"Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm."
"I've always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that."
"The studios don't seem to foster good writing. They're not so interested in that, but they're more interested in what worked most recently. They're definitely very serious about making money, and that's not a wrong thing, but you don't have to make money the same way all the time."
"That's another way of writing a song, of course. Just talking to somebody that ain't there. That's the best way. That's the truest way. Then it just becomes a question of how heroic your speech is. To me, it's something to strive after."
"Things which any idiot could write usually have the quality of having been written by an idiot."
"I wanted to write something visual that I could read to the children. This was when I created the idea of Redwall Abbey in my imagination. As I wrote, the idea grew, and the manuscript along with it."
"My secret for writing is going back to clarity. I'm very clear about what I want to accomplish-the goal-and then the next two are focus and concentration. And I've probably spent my whole life both practicing those two and teaching them. Focus. Focus on a single point and concentration. And concentrating on a single thing till it's done."
"The process of writing a book is like the process of preparing a dinner. Serving dishes, choosing ingredients and so on."
"I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18."
"Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing."
"When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth."
"Those who write clearly have readers."
"A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."
"To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations."
"It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels."
"I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public."
"The best models of English writing are Shakespeare and the Old Testament."
"What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us."
"In love, writing is dangerous, not to mention pointless."
"I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done."
