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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"Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans."
"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself"
"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that's the only way you can do anything really good."
"Writing is great because in the writing you never have to... First of all you never have to leave your home. And you never have to meet the test of reality when you're writing."
"Standard mathematics has recently been rendered obsolete by the discovery that for years we have been writing the numeral five backward. This has led to reevaluation of counting as a method of getting from one to ten. Students are taught advanced concepts of Boolean algebra, and formerly unsolvable equations are dealt with by threats of reprisals."
"Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat... where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches."
"Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought."
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
"The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest."
"I never considered myself part of rock 'n' roll. My stuff was more adult. It was more difficult for teenagers to relate to; my stuff was filled with more despair than anything you'd associate with rock 'n' roll. Since I couldn't see people dancing, I didn't write jitterbugs or twists. I wrote rhythms that moved me. My style requires pure heart singing."
"It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones."
"The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties."
"Before I write I let my mind go blind and let the lord do his thing."
"I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward."
"I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new."
"you must not come lightly to the blank page."
"I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him."
"I don't take notes; I don't outline, I don't do anything like that. I just flail away at the goddamn thing. I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami. You can't sell it as caviar."
"I'm me, and I'm here, and I'm writing."
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's."
