Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past."
"For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale."
"I write in different styles because I hear different voices in my head. It would be boring to have always the same voice, point of view."
"Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind."
"There was more of a flow to my output of writing in the past, certainly. Having no contemporaries left means you cannot say, "Well, so-and-so will like this," which you do when you're younger. You realize there is no so-and-so anymore. You are your own so-and-so. There is a bleak side to it."
"Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!"
"I have begun writing what I have said I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority)."
"These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick."
"I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing."
"These little books I write, such as The End of Freedom, about the post-9/11 political climate in the United States, sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Whereas, I hear novels on marriage are not selling. This is perhaps not the judgment of God, but it is certainly that of history."
"The first TV babies are now writing with a TV mind that has no attention span at all."
"Writing when you are already very old means you have lived through the endings of so many things, you are more aware of the shape life takes. You begin to know Death, you've been close to it. But youth can barely imagine the end of this journey."
"If you are at the mercy of what they call print interviews and the mercy of people who write about you, they can always tell lies."
"I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started."
"I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions."
"The New York Times is the worst in that hardly anybody can write English over there. Most of it reads like slight translations from the German."
"A writer represents his family history. My grandfather was a senator and my father served in the Roosevelt administration. In other words, I grew up in politics. This is why it seemed perfectly natural to take part in the battles of my time, and to participate in the writing of the history of my country."
"When I was asked to write a message for your brochure I gladly accepted as I remember my first school tour of England was Wales. The experience proved extremely useful in my development of a cricketer."
"I started to work up in my old bedroom, playing, writing songs, and it somehow came to me that I could introduce soul music. Nobody seemed to be doing that."
"I went to Morocco, joined a band called Pegasus, ran out of money, went to Gibraltar and worked on the docks, writing songs about the sun and the morning and the birds."
