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 don't claim anything of the work. It is his work. I am like a little pencil in his hand. That is all. He does the thinking. He does the writing. The pencil has nothing to do with it."
"My colleagues in elementary particle theory in many lands [and I] are driven by the usual insatiable curiosity of the scientist, and our work is a delightful game. I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results. How can it be that writing down a few simple and elegant formulae, like short poems governed by strict rules such as those of the sonnet or the waka, can predict universal regularities of Nature?"
"Mostly singing was cathartic, writing was cathartic, therapeutic. I don't think I had a goal, particularly, to sing or put it out there for anybody."
"I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead."
"I am a galley slave to pen and ink."
"My family pleaded with me to forget literature and do something sensible, such as find some sort of useful work."
"In the United States, if you ask teachers, "Are there children whom we should call 'gifted?'", many if not most will say 'No.' That's the politically correct answer. But if you then ask the teacher to rank order students in terms of how well they paint or write or dance, they'll have little difficulty in doing so."
"Nothing so fretful, so despicable as a Scribbler, see what I am, and what a parcel of Scoundrels I have brought about my ears, and what language I have been obliged to treat them with to deal with them in their own way; - all this comes of Authorship."
"One hates an author that's all author."
"Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company."
"I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words."
"She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon]."
"When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away."
"Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it — or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character."
"Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it."
"I've always believed that there's an amazing number of things you can do through a rock'n'roll song and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat."
"I could write an entertaining novel about rejection slips, but I fear it would be overly long."
"My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history."
"Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment."
"I do see an interest in writing for Twitter. While publishers still do love the novel and people do still like to sink into one, the very quick form is appealing because of the pace of life."
