Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer."
"I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans."
"For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel."
"I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books."
"Part of my mind is working on how to end the thing while I'm going on. You need at least two brains to write."
"The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all."
"I would recommend, definitely, developing a 'day job' that you like - don't expect to make money writing!"
"That's the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it."
"If I was writing about an academic or a more difficult person, I would use the Latinate vocabulary more, but I do think Anglo-saxon is the language of emotion."
"I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it."
"I worked more intensively hour after hour when I was starting out [writing]. More laboriously. I'd say quantity is important as well as quality, and if you're not producing enough, make a schedule and stick to it."
"I think a lot of what goes into writing can be taught - not mixing metaphors, etc."
"Because I'm not writing all the time (thank goodness), my mind is sometimes pleasantly blank."
"I don't believe a good poet is very often deliberately obscure. A poet writes in a way necessary to him or her; the reader may then find the poem difficult."
"I write first for myself as a therapeutic process, to get stuff out and to deal with it."
"I started writing songs, I guess, when I was about 13 or 14, but I didn't know if they were good enough yet or anything."
"I started writing more with my voice in mind."
"I've had trouble being in relationships and writing. This has been a real problem for me. I don't know if it's because I'm not free to fantasize or create these fantasy things about other people"
"It's easier to write songs when you're single."
"I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together."
