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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"The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned."
"I write emotional algebra."
"When I started out, nobody gave me scripts, so I had to write..."
"If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive."
"We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues."
"I love opera, I love writing for the voice, I love telling stories with music."
"When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I learned from me."
"Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins."
"One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions."
"It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?"
"I'll always write about what's going on in my life and the reason for that is it's not actually because I'm so fascinated with myself, it's because I can't think. I can't think like have thoughts in my head and think them through and come to a conclusion. It's like math for me."
"As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward."
"A reader has to be concerned only with the end result; unless he chooses to analyze it, he does not have to know by what means that result was achieved-but it is my job to know."
"A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about."
"I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."
"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence."
"It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are."
"If I want to be alone, some place I can write, I can read, I can pray, I can cry, I can do whatever I want - I go to the bathroom."
"It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated."
"I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp."
