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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"Having been the discoverer of many splendid things, he is said to have asked his friends and relations that, after his death, they should place on his tomb a cylinder enclosing a sphere, writing on it the proportion of the containing solid to that which is contained."
"I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing."
"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make."
"Give me a paper and pen, so I can write about my life of sin. A couple of bottles of gin, in case I don't get in."
"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."
"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences."
"I write a story in my head. I see the story like a movie."
"Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen."
"It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were."
"There will never be another now - I'll make the most of today. There will never be another me - I'll make the most of myself."
"Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life."
"If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."
"People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories."
"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."
"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director. ... (when asked who wrote 'Some Enchanted Evening') Rodgers and Hammerstein, if you can imagine it taking two men to write one song. ... Good authors, too, who once knew better words now use only four-letter words writing prose. ... Brush up your Shakespeare and they'll all kowtow."
"Top people have very clear goals. They know who they are and they know what they want. They write it down and they make plans for its accomplishment."
"I didn't know if it would be a successful one, or what the stages would be, but I always saw myself as a lifetime musician and songwriter...I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along...I'm a synthesist. I'm always making music. And I make a lot of different kinds of music all the time. Some of it gets finished and some of it doesn't...The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with."
"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
