Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
"In a sense, my grandmother was living in the Iron Age. There was no system of writing among the nomads. Metal artifacts were rare and precious.... The first time she saw a white person my grandmother was in her thirties: she thought this person's skin had burned off."
"If I see an ending, I can work backward."
"The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning."
"You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable."
"Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift."
"I haven't written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I-nor for that matter anyone else-will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen -year -old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart."
"God gave music the power to carry his light into the darkness. That’s a mighty privilege. It means intentionally telling stories and writing songs that bear truth that outlasts the songs themselves. If I did this in hopes of thunderous applause and piles of cash, I would have quit years ago. But there are moments on the stage when I sense something magical, a connection with the band and the audience, when our stories intersect and suddenly we’re wading in an ancient river. Suddenly the song is secondary to the greater story being told through each of us."
"Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence."
"I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels."
"Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity."
"To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art."
"I am so happy to be on a show with writing I wanted to participate in."
"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."
"The ideas for stories that thronged my brain would not let me rest till I had got rid of them by writing them."
"In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
"...after a night spent writing poetry, one is almost happy to hear the milkman at the door."
"Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions, torn by dreams, By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one. The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate."
"Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother me ... Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us-say, because we are disabled or unemployed."
"Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation."
