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 would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board."
"The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages."
"If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning."
"Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it."
"But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot"
"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."
"Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing."
"Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts."
"I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do."
"Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there."
"Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate."
"Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?"
"At times, I get very lonely because people are afraid to talk to me or don't wait for me to write a response. I'm shy and tongue-tied at times. I find it difficult to talk to people who I don't know."
"The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway."
"A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished."
"Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning."
"I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized."
"By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing."
"I'm not a big fan of psychoanalysis: I think if you have mental problems what you need are good pills. But I do think that if you have thinks that bother you, things that are unresolved, the more that you talk about them, write about them, the less serious they become."
"Writing is seduction."
