Writing quotes

Writing

30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

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Writing quotes (page 282 of 1537)

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Wayne Dyer Author, Motivational Speaker
Writing

"Flexibility, openness and softness are consorting with life. When you are rigid and you know the answer and don't listen to other people's point of view, you are consorting with death. Everything that is old and close to death is brittle and breaks apart including our thinking. So always stay flexible and soft and listen to others with caring. And truthfully, all of the verses hit me - especially when you think about them for days, and then write on them."

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Wayne Dyer Author, Motivational Speaker
Writing

"All excuses are nothing more than misalignments with God. Just imagine the great creative Source needing an excuse. It doesn't have any concept of, "I'm too busy. I'm too old. I'm too afraid. Things are going to take too long." Source doesn't work like that. The Tao does nothing, Lao-tzu writes, but it leaves nothing undone."

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Wayne Dyer Author, Motivational Speaker
Writing

"When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?""

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Wayne Dyer Author, Motivational Speaker
Writing

"When I sit down to write a book, I do not know where the energy and the words come from. I just sit down, and soon it is flowing through my hand and onto the paper."

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Wendi McLendon-Covey Actress, Comedian
Writing

"As a performer, you can't just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You have to write and develop projects for yourself, because casting people aren't always going to see you the way you want to be seen. Write a one-person show, shoot a short film, do plays, whatever - activity breeds activity. No one's interested in a stay-at-home actress."

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Wesley Willis Musician
Writing

"I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness."

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Whitney Cummings Comedian, Actress, Writer
Writing

"I think that we're in a really amazing time, where there are really a lot of really fantastic female actresses and comedians. I imagine there's just a lot of opportunity for women to have powerful roles. Or it's just that there's more women writing TV. Women tend to maybe write strong women."

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Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer
Writing

"Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life."

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Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer
Writing

"Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world."

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Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer
Writing

"Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing."

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Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer
Writing

"I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before."

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William Beckett Musician
Writing

"I'm not bashing people who write songs that are just 'get on the dance floor and party party', I understand why people need those songs too, but I don't really write lyrics like that."

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William Beckett Musician
Writing

"I wasn't really writing anything that I felt was worth it at the end, but then certain things sparked me as a solo writer - to be able to try new things and experiment, and ultimately challenge myself as a performer and as a songwriter and just to commit to ideas, and not be afraid to be myself."

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William Butler Yeats Poet, Playwright
Writing

"Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write."

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William Butler Yeats Poet, Playwright
Writing

"When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance."

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