Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I would love to continue in music, with writing... but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don't need to be blonde when I'm 60!"
"If I'm gonna write songs about my exes, they can write songs about me. That's how it works."
"I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It's a natural process."
"You can write a book on how to ruin someone’s perfect day."
"I write a lot of songs about love and I think that’s because to me love seems like this huge complicated thing. But it seems like every once in a while, two people get it figured out, two people get it right. And so I think the rest of us, we walk around daydreaming about what that might be like. To find that one great love, where all of a sudden everything that seemed to be so complicated, became simple. And everything that used to seem so wrong all of a sudden seemed right because you were with the person who made you feel fearless."
"I would just be constantly writing all these zingers - like, 'Burn. That would really get her.' And I know people are going to obsess over who it's about, because they think they have all my relationships mapped out. But there's a reason there are not any overt call-outs in that song. My intent was not to create some gossip-fest. I wanted people to apply it to a situation where they felt betrayed in their own lives."
"When we're falling in love or out of it, that's when we most need a song that says how we feel. Yeah, I write a lot of songs about boys. And I'm very happy to do that."
"I'm not afraid to write my feelings in songs."
"So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?"
"I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them."
"They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?""
"They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot."
"We read often with as much talent as we write."
"Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding."
"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients."
"We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses."
"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."
"The virtue of books is to be readable."
"Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France."
"Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise."
