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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"Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes."
"In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie."
"There's enough songs for people to listen to, if they want to listen to songs. For every man, woman and child on earth, they could be sent, probaby, each of them, a hundred records, and never be repeated. There's enough songs. Unless someone's gonna come along with a pure heart and has something to say. That's a different story."
"Once I went into songwriting, I figured I had to - I couldn't be a hellfire rock 'n' roller. But I could write hellfire lyrics."
"I mostly write about the working poor. Somehow, they're not being written about much anymore. I'm very interested in people who are in a situation that needs a little puzzling out. The thing that gets me started on a story is a person in a tough situation."
"As far as my creative urge is concerned, I do sit down and write my own music...I'll tell you a writer who I think is a genius: Ray Stevens. He comes up with some of the most fantastic novelty ideas. Dolly Parton also writes well. I like a lot of songs, a lot of writers."
"I wrote about a bird that cleaned a crocodile's teeth. The story was so good that my teacher could not believe that a ten-year-old could write that well. I was even punished because my teacher thought I'd lied about writing it! I had always loved to write, but it was then that I realized that I had a talent for it."
"It's a very simple example to show that if you miss one step in a process in can cost you an enormous amount of time and money to fix. With a checklist, you can write it down and give it some someone else for them to do successfully. Checklists require discipline and organization, which is something internet marketers have to master."
"Write while the heat is in you. The write who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. To achieve something you've never achieved before, you must become someone you've never been before."
"I can write songs, I've had songs in movies, but I can't compose film scores, you know?"
"I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along."
"I don't like to write rhetorically or get on a soapbox. I try to make the stuff multi-layered, so that it always has a life outside its social context. I don't believe that you can tell people anything; you can only draw them in."
"In junior high I read a lot of Stephen King, whose Americana approach to writing was often about "the terror next door" and at the same time I was reading a lot of Clive Barker, who was on the other end of the horror pendulum: insidious and disturbingly psychological. I found it fascinating how these two authors came at horror from two totally different perspectives."
"I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say."
"Ask photographers to write and they have nothing to say; ask them to talk about their work and they won't shut up."
"It is immoral not to tell."
"A writer cannot put himself today in service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it."
"I know very dimly when I start what's going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write."
"There are people who would rather choke than go see my movies. They write me letters all the time."
"All questions of the Law are to be decided only by appeal to my writings, each for himself"
