Writing quotes
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"We want to be famous as a writer, as a poet, as a painter, as a politician, as a singer, or what you will. Why? Because we really don't love what we are doing. If you loved to sing, or to paint, or to write poems, if you really loved it you would not be concerned with whether you are famous or not."
"The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it."
"What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life."
"First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice."
"...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic."
"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."
"We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters."
"The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business."
"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."
"Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes."
"I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of."
"Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid."
"The important thing is not what we write but how we write, and in my opinion the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be. In other words we must write dangerously"
"Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it."
"For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible."
"Kids, fiction is the truth inside the lie, and the truth of this fiction is simple enough: the magic exists."
"You have to finish things - that's what you learn from, you learn by finishing things."
"In this poor body, composed of one hundred bones and nine openings, is something called spirit, a flimsy curtain swept this way and that by the slightest breeze. It is spirit, such as it is, which led me to poetry, at first little more than a pastime, then the full business of my life. There have been times when my spirit, so dejected, almost gave up the quest, other times when it was proud, triumphant. So it has been from the very start, never finding peace with itself, always doubting the worth of what it makes."
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face."
"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
