Writing quotes

Writing

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

30.7K quotes

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Writing quotes (page 287 of 1537)

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Umberto Eco Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Writing

"I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk."

Writing Ideas Names
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Umberto Eco Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Writing

"I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel."

Writing Years Fall
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Umberto Eco Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Writing

"I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person."

Writing Character Facts
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Umberto Eco Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Writing

"Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets."

Writing Poet Elizabethan
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Umberto Eco Writer, Philosopher, Literary Critic
Writing

"It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world."

Writing Trying Past
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Safety lies in catering to the in-group. We are not all brave. All I would ask of writers who find it hard to question the universal validity of their personal opinions and affiliations is that they consider this: Every group we belong to - by gender, sex, race, religion, age - is an in-group, surrounded by an immense out-group, living next door and all over the world, who will be alive as far into the future as humanity has a future. That out-group is called other people. It is for them that we write."

Writing Lying Sex
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!"

Writing Lying Truth
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them."

Writing Children Book
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"To read and to write. Some writers have to be told to write. They think their job is to meet agents and have experiences and they can just be rich and famous. Their job is to write. Some really don't realize that. And you can't write unless you read."

Thinking Writing Jobs
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male."

Men Writing Book
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Writers are egotists. All artists are. They can’t be altruists and get their work done. And writers love to whine about the Solitude of the Author’s Life, and lock themselves into cork-lined rooms or droop around in bars in order to whine better. But although most writing is done in solitude, I believe that it is done, like all the arts, for an audience. That is to say, with an audience. All the arts are performance arts, only some of them are sneakier about it than others."

Believe Writing Art
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else"

Writing Art Mysterious
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"I don't believe that a writer 'gets' (takes into the head) an 'idea' (some sort of mental object) 'from' somewhere, and then turns it into words, and writes them on paper. At least in my experience, it doesn't work that way. The stuff has to be transformed into oneself, it has to be composted, before it can grow into a story."

Believe Writing Ideas
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Writers need to learn their trade, and how to negotiate the increasingly difficult marketplace. The trade can be taught and learned just as the craft can. But a workshop where the trade is the principal focus of interest is not a writing workshop. It is a business class."

Writing Class Focus
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Ursula K. Le Guin Author, Poet, Essayist
Writing

"Writers have to get used to launching something beautiful and watching it crash and burn. They also have to learn when to let go control, when the work takes off on its own and flies, farther than they ever planned or imagined, to places they didn't know they knew."

Writing Beautiful Letting Go
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