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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"I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down."
"Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people."
"There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!"
"A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left."
"If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments."
"There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing."
"What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class."
"A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male."
"There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem."
"Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them."
"I like to write books that touch my heart. I want to entertain, and I love to entertain myself."
"Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre."
"I was a bit shut down by a lot of the snarkiness and biliousness in some of the poetry blogs. I was tired of aesthetic wars that weren't productive and were becoming mean-spirited. I was probably overworked as well, so I stopped reading and writing for about a year."
"I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations."
"I began just writing poems and then fell in love with the form."
"Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist."
"Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience… many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint."
"Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist."
"Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash."
"I am interested in my music lasting only while I'm alive. I'm not writing for the future."
