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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"You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences."
"I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began working on '[To Kill a] Mockingbird'. I think that what went before may have been a rather subconscious form of learning how to write, of training myself."
"About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell?" "I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other."
"[Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television."
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
"I always write the pieces I want to write."
"My attitude to writing is like when you do wallpapering, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet. And then your friends say: It's terrific!"
"There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes."
"I wouldn't write any kind of book without a contract and an advance. You can't invest that amount of time and effort without one."
"In advertisements for your favorite products, are women denigrated or objectified in some way? All of that is important. I would rewrite my kids' books, I would write it in the books for the babysitter!"
"I would like to shift more into writing for and producing people."
"It's hard for me to just practice without writing something."
"Since I was a small child, I was always writing either poems or plays... plays in which I had the starring part."
"Who then to frail mortality shall trust But limns the water, or but writes in dust."
"But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him."
"Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not."
"When you suffer, you can look deeply at your situation and find the many blessings that are already surrounding you. It is wonderful to sit with a pen and paper and write down all the conditions for happiness that are already there, already available to you right in this moment."
"Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution."
"Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available."
"There is something to be said for the openness to form, and literary form because it forces you to actually think about the other person, and their motivations, and to try to see them from all sides and to really write about them not as caricature."
