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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"I like vocal word stuff. But I don't always write with an instrument, I usually write a capella. It's more like drawing in the air with your fingers. It's closest to the choreography of a bee. You're freer."
"When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction."
"Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn’t trade my life for the world."
"I wouldn't say the purpose of making art is to enjoy it necessarily. For me, it happens to be the thing I enjoy the most. I don't even know what the purpose of art is really, I just know that is something that makes me feel satisfied in a way that other things don't. That's all I know, that's why I like to write songs and films or draw. I just like to make things and somehow I find it gives me a feeling of satisfaction that I can't find in other areas of my life."
"It is dishonorable to say one thing and think another; how much more dishonorable to write one thing and think another."
"The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one."
"The big thing about writing is three commands: Have fun. Don't think. Don't care."
"Does anybody learn writing, or do they just touch someone who lets them see the power of the deleted word?"
"When I'm writing it's as if I'm the observer. It's as if that computer screen there -it used to be the typewriter - just kind of dissolves and there's this whirling tunnel of mist and there's a kind of proscenium arch, and then there are my characters, and they say what they say, and I laugh sometimes in surprise at what they say."
"I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil."
"I was amplifying the negative at the expense of the positive, not to serve any useful function, not to make my writing better, but to destroy it. The lizard brain, so attuned to people laughing behind our backs, was on high alert for this sort of criticism and would do anything it could to stop me from writing again. I haven't sought out and read a review or a tweet since."
"The biggest takeaway for anyone seeking to write is this: don't go looking for the way other authors do their work. You won't find many who are consistent enough to copy, and there are enough variations in approach that it's obvious that it's not like hitting home runs or swinging a golf club. There isn't a standard approach, there's only what works for you (and what doesn't)."
"Some people think that writers are innately solitary and that there's a kind of romance to that solitariness. I tend to think that what writers really want to do is get accepted into things. They want to get accepted into society, into culture, into intelligentsia, into the fun. Writing is their mechanism, their instrument, for doing that."
"Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it."
"Writing is very much a playground - an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do."
"A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time."
"Don't write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn't be changed."
"Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love."
"So it was just a case of getting a bunch of songs that I had been writing for years but hadn't recorded together, and the result was My Own Best Enemy."
"Strange! I don't understand how it is that we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without being able to picture it."
