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 haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days."
"The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written."
"When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane."
"The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings."
"One writes to find words' meanings."
"There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process."
"The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval."
"There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow."
"Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page; it writes three hundred."
"Style means the right word. The rest matters little."
"Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted."
"Science Fiction will never run out of things to wonder about until the human race ceases to use its brain."
"I believe every one of us possesses a fundamental right to tell our own story."
"Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul."
"All writing is a form of prayer."
"No sooner had I stepp'd into these pleasures Than I began to think of rhymes and measures: The air that floated by me seem'd to say 'Write! thou wilt never have a better day."
"All clean and comfortable I sit down to write."
"We write to discover what we think."
"Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up."
"Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance."
