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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"My website inspired me to create my book club and provides me with a creative outlet where I can write about things that interest me. It's a platform where I can present ideas or new ventures and get feedback straight from the people who mean the most to me."
"When I have trouble writing, I step outside my studio into the garden and pull weeds until my mind clears--I find weeding to be the best therapy there is for writer's block."
"Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own"
"No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys it, even if he doesn't get paid."
"If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship."
"A good editor understands what you're talking and writing about and doesn't meddle too much."
"As I am writing, another illustration of ye generation of hills proposed above comes into my mind. Milk is as uniform a liquor as ye chaos was. If beer be poured into it & ye mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of ye curdled substance will appear as rugged & mountanous as the Earth in any place."
"From journalism I learned to write under pressure, to work with deadlines, to have limited space and time, to conduct and interview, to find information, to research, and above all, to use language as efficiently as possible and to remember always that there is a reader out there."
"Writing is a constant exercise in longing."
"If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die."
"If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always White men who do that and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment."
"The first two, three, four weeks are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn't show up invited, eventually she just shows up."
"People who write for reward by way of recognition or monetary gain don't know what they're doing. They're in the category of those who write; they are not writers. Writing is simply something you must do. It's rather like virtue in that it is its own reward. Writing is selfish and contradictory in its terms. First of all, you're writing for an audience of one, you must please the one person you're writing for. Yourself."
"People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me."
"I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word."
"While drinking, while talking, while writing, while watering our garden, it's always possible to practice living in the here and the now."
"Neither in writing nor in reading wilt thou be able to lay down rules for others before thou shalt have first learned to obey rules thyself."
"Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind."
"During the fifteen or twenty years in which I tried - it was not always easy with publishers, newspapers, etc. - to forbid photographs, it was not at all in order to mark a sort of blank, absence, or disappearance of the image; it was because the code that dominates at once the production of these images, the framing they are made to undergo, the social implications (showing the writer's head framed in front his bookshelves, the whole scenario) seemed to me to be, first of all, terribly boring, but also contrary to what I am trying to write and to work on."
"In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it."
