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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"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."
"The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience."
"When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy."
"It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on."
"The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity."
"If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain."
"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."
"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
"If I fail, the film industry writes me off as another statistic. If I succeed, they pay me a million bucks to fly out to Hollywood and fart."
"The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them."
"Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet."
"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught."
"People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk."
"Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays."
"I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium."
"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."
"Sophisticated ignorance, write my curses in cursive."
"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."
