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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"My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from."
"Factoring in millions of people when I'm writing a song is not a good idea. I don't ever do it."
"I do write nice songs about the guys who are nice to me! Eventually, I'm sure one of them will write a response - that's a pretty scary concept, actually! But I make sure I only write bad songs about the ones who deserve it."
"I like to write about relationships. I like it when my friends come over and we crowd around the piano and sing Journey songs at the top of our lungs... And I like things that make me feel seven again. I don't ever look down on people for the way they choose to have fun; it's just not necessarily the way I like to have fun."
"I don't talk about my personal life in great detail. I write about it in my songs, and I feel like you can share enough about your life in your music to let people know what you're going through."
"I love writing thank-you notes. There's something very nostalgic to me about the feel of a card and putting pen to paper. How many times in our lives are we required to put pen to paper anymore?"
"I write songs about what I go through."
"If something happens to me, you're going to hear about it. I only know how to write songs about my life."
"In recent years, I've been writing because I'm fortunate enough to work in the world of food television, to travel and taste and learn about cooking from the best chefs in the business."
"When I get into the moment of actually feeling like I want to write, to finish something, I do what I've always read authors do, and park myself at a desk and bang things out for three hours. And if I have to throw it all away, I throw it all away."
"I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with Marilyn Monroe and that's where I started. It doesn't make any sense because he was gay, but it was just the idea of the short guy and the beautiful blonde out of his league. That's where I started, but very quickly it became about me."
"I've never gone through the paces that writing textbooks sometimes recommend, such as writing out a character's biography, or determining what his favorite food is, or most traumatic memory, etc. - that's always seemed like a fraudulent way of assembling a fictional person."
"For each of my novels, I've had something of a eureka moment of deciding what world I want to set it in - Wall Street, the pop-music industry, Harvard - and what the very vague contours of the narrative might be (which typically get changed a lot through the writing process)."
"I write the books I want to read. I'm interested in seeing what happens with this book in the marketplace."
"My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured."
"I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had."
"I've tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I'd rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them asexcellent ballplayers, first-rate players. But I'm sure I have contributed to false values--as Stanley Woodward said, "Godding up those ballplayers." The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."
"But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long."
"He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public. That statement only is fit to be made public, which you have come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity."
"We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent wasa youthful effervescence which we have now lost."
