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 just wanted a song to sing, and there came a point where I couldn't sing anything...nobo dy else was writing what I wanted to sing. I couldn't find it anywhere. If I could I probably would never have started writing."
"I don't write the songs; I just write 'em down."
"You just don't wake up one day and decide that you need to write songs."
"If you don't have to write songs, why write them? I've got enough where I don't really feel the urge to write anything additional."
"In the meantime [1965-67], [Bob] Dylan was again writing some of the best love songs in the genre, like "Visions of Johanna," "Just Like a Woman," and "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.""
"The great thing about fiction is that I don't have to settle on an answer to any troubling question, or even a solution. I hope that my stories serve as explorations and help show readers how and why real-life women don't always make the "correct" decisions in the face of economic and sexual troubles. We all screw up, but the women I write about don't have back-up plans or money in the back or resources to fix what they have broken."
"I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses."
"You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing."
"Maybe the hardest lesson is the one I have to learn over and over again, that each story is its own animal, that every story I write is going to come only with difficulty."
"The best and easiest lesson for me was to learn that writing is mostly hard work."
"My normal writing day involves three hours of actual writing, before noon, and the rest is just feeding the writing. There is teaching (so I can afford to write), travel to be planned and executed. There are dozens of emails daily, gardening, lots of dishes (where do all these dishes come from?), daily family emergencies, and, of course, the petting of the donkeys. The smell of donkeys is heavenly, and their he-honking is the sweetest music. I feel calm just thinking about them."
"I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them."
"I loved writing for the school newspaper. I liked to report and interview people, but I really liked to write columns, funny columns."
"The truth is I tried to write for years and I wasn't very good."
"Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician."
"In fact, when I finally realized I was really going to write, when I was about thirty-four, I was working on my Ph.D. in Mathematics. I was just about to earn my Master's along the way, but I knew something was wrong because I found myself crying all the time."
"I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck."
"I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me."
"Weirdly the writing experience has not really changed that much except it used to be that I was busy because I had to work a couple of jobs to earn money, so I didn't have time to write."
"Writing is so wrapped up in ego, but with math one is just trying to get it right, although you're often wrong. I think math helped me become a good critic of myself, come at writing a little less personally."
