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 thing about me is, coming from an alternative music background and singing for nine years, being basically invisible, I'm so used to writing for myself - and at the end of the day, I do it because I feel like I have to. So when I'm recording or writing, I don't have other people in mind."
"I never stopped writing about what was actually going on in my life. There's nothing to hide."
"I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing . . . not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer."
"Idleness does drive me crazy, but I'd rather read or write than do anything just to work. A kind of respect has been instilled in me for acting: I love it too much to ever have a bad relationship with it."
"It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel."
"I wake up fairly early every day, by 8, for sure. Sunday is a lighter writing day than the weekdays, but I still wake up and write for about an hour, beginning right around 8. I definitely have coffee first, and then I start writing. I do think it's kind of hard to get the right level of concentration without coffee."
"As long as I'm around the cats in the hip hop scene, they'll throw me a track and I'll write a rap over it."
"I write about heroes all the time, and I'm struck by how much of what fills us with wonder in the man-made world was the brainchild of a monster. I mean, slaves built most of the ancient wonders, our city skylines are dominated by the product of sometimes very ruthless capitalist ideals. There's a horrifying thought that I often wonder, which is, are monsters sometimes necessary?"
"The human race may be compared to a writer. At the outset a writer has often only a vague general notion of the plan of his work, and of the thought he intends to elaborate. As he proceeds, penetrating his material, laboring to express himself fitly, he lays a firmer grasp on his thought; he finds himself. So the human race is writing its story, finding itself, discovering its own underlying purpose, revising, recasting a tale pathetic often, yet none the less sublime."
"Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea."
"I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down."
"Journalists write because they have nothing to say, and have something to say because they write."
"Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough. To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity."
"I'm writing this book because we're all going to die."
"Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind."
"Write in recollection and amazement for yourself."
"I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type."
"Writing is like paying myself a formal visit."
"I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said."
"If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine."
