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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"The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides...It’s the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you’re writing, because the teacher won’t like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in."
"Learn. Ceaselessly. Learn to code, to write persuasively, to understand new technologies, to bring out the best in your team, to find underused resources and to spot patterns."
"The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist."
"If you are afraid to write or edit or assemble or disassemble, you are merely a spectator. And you are trapped, trapped by the instructions of those you've chosen to follow. Twenty people in the field and eighty thousand in the stands. The spectators are the ones who paid to watch, but it's the player on the field who are truly alive."
"I wonder why anyone would hesitate to be generous with their writing. I mean, if you really want to make a living, go to Wall Street and trade oil futures ... We're writers. We're doing something that is inherently a generous act. We're exposing ourselves to the muse and to the things that frighten us. Why do that if you're not willing to be generous? And paradoxically, almost ironically, it turns out that the more generous you are, the more money you make. But that's secondary. For me, the privilege of being generous is why I get to do this."
"Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map."
"Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know."
"I didn't feel up to writing about 9/11. If I were to write about it, it would take me years."
"Someone wanted me to write a profile for ESPN about the commissioner of baseball, and I said, "He's just some suit! Some Republican. No!" I mean if you want me to write about baseball, boxing or football, I'll write about those things because I watch them, I think about them a lot and I like them. But I don't want to write about Barry Bonds."
"The way in which sports focuses more on the peccadilloes, lives and putative personalities of athletes and less on the finer points of playing games, I've become less interested in it. I don't want to write sports profiles."
"In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on."
"And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces."
"When I'm writing music, I'm not acting it out - it's all me. I feel that my responsibility is to be truthful about myself, first and foremost. I'm not going to sing things I don't believe in no matter who is benefitting from it."
"I think that all people that get to a certain level of their celebrity are brands. I accept that. I don't value it in any personal way. I value it as an element of my work. I'm more pragmatic in that sense. I do get very rattled if I don't get enough normalcy in my life. I like solitude. I can't even write music if I'm not isolated."
"Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it."
"I think it's better if you write poems that look like you."
"It's harder to write two people happy and in love than two people fighting and driving each other crazy."
"My hope in writing 'Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead' was to change the conversation from what women can't do to what we can."
"If I didn't write in my journal every couple of days, I felt like I was going to burst. Later I learned the research about how important journaling can be to recovering from trauma and grief. That was definitely true for me."
"I just like to entertain myself by sitting down and writing songs."
