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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"If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing - it doesn't matter. As long as we're creating, we're cultivating meaning."
"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."
"One should use common words to say uncommon things"
"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
"The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost."
"You are a bundle of mysteries. Finding and conquering yourself is a lifetime task. There are unplumbed depths in you full of the rich ore of personal discovery. Explore your self! There is power in you — the power to change yourself and to change the world."
"I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word."
"Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go."
"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind."
"I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them."
"Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work."
"Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress ... the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you."
"I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami."
"I am writing a book. So far I have the pages numbered."
"Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power."
"Creatures are cups. The sciences and the arts and all branches of knowledge are inscriptions around the outside of the cups. When a cup shatters, the writing can no longer be read. The wine's the thing! The wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and know what lasts and what to love. The man who truly asks must be sure of two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he's doing or thinking now. And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't know yet. Asking is half of knowing."
"I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?"
"Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books ... I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life."
"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."
"For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything."
