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 Wright Brothers created the single greatest cultural force since the invention of writing. The airplane became the first World Wide Web, bringing people, languages, ideas, and values together."
"I only write music for myself, I don't try and appeal to anyone else."
"A songwriter writes songs all the time, whereas just writing a song can be done by anyone, anytime."
"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."
"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
"One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it."
"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
"There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity."
"I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers."
"Dear Mother, I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and..."
"Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation."
"The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself."
"The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting."
"A man is crazy who writes a secret in any other way than one which will conceal it from the vulgar."
"It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves."
"Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching."
""Very" is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen. For example, would you rather hear the mincing shallowness of "I love you very much" or the heart-slamming intensity of "I love you"?"
"If I write what my soul thinks it will be visible, and the words will be its body."
"Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life."
"It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating."
