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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"That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all."
"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down."
"Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself."
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
"Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat."
"History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes."
"I've always thought it was arrogant to write about yourself, particularly when you're still alive."
"Do you think I know what I'm doing? That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself? As much as a pen knows what it's writing, or the ball can guess where it's going next."
"Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story."
"We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail."
"This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character."
"First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little."
"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant."
""Only write what you know" is very good advice. I do my best to stick to it. I wrote about gods and dreams and America because I knew about them. And I wrote about what it's like to wander into Faerie because I knew about that. I wrote about living underneath London because I knew about that too. And I put people into the stories because I knew them: the ones with pumpkins for heads, and the serial killers with eyes for teeth, and the little chocolate people filled with raspberry cream and the rest of them."
"So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'"
"Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life."
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine."
"Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. ... I have 10 or so, and thats a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them."
"Burnout is grist to the mill. I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words."
"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."
