"America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?"
Read quote
3 likes
Writing quotes
Writing
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Writing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Writing quotes (page 272 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry."
Read quote
3 likes
"My advice: write down everything you eat. It's amazing what that "self honesty" can do for you. (Do you really want to have to confess that doughnut? I thought not.)"
Read quote
3 likes
"I can’t talk about anything or write about anything if I don’t understand it. So a lot of the stuff that I go through and a lot of the time that I spend is understanding."
Read quote
3 likes
"Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially."
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't write songs that don't affect me on some level, because I figure if I am not moved by it, if its not something that I have a longing to celebrate or to be reminded of, if it doesn't affect me, then how can I possibly think it is going to affect somebody else. My touchstone is write something that matters."
Read quote
3 likes
"To me, it's all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Love is an irrational force, making humans do all sorts of strange and wonderful things like write poetry and take up the ukulele."
Read quote
3 likes
"When the writing is good and it suits your character, you don't have to memorize anything, because it just makes sense. You read it and you go, "Oh, that makes sense." And it's easy."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do write about thinkers. And that's what I love about reading. My favorite books, the ones that made me sit there for days, weeks, months, years, and pop back into my head - they make me think a lot."
Read quote
3 likes
"I have people say that they love how I keep them off balance as to what is real or not real about pretty much everything I write. I think it's an accurate description of how I feel every day. I can't tell what's real and what's not anymore. I think that's what makes art."
Read quote
3 likes
"I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem."
Read quote
3 likes
"I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived."
Read quote
3 likes
"Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction."
Read quote
3 likes
"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."
Read quote
3 likes
"Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once."
Read quote
3 likes
"When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color."
Read quote
3 likes
"To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry."
Read quote
3 likes
"Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence."
Read quote
3 likes