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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"Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart."
"Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could have made me do it, or prevented me from doing it."
"I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life."
"I know there's a lot of competition in the world of magazines and newspapers and we have to make headlines and be sensational and sell, and saying bad things about me is going to sell more papers than writing good things about me."
"I want to sound like an instrument. I want my voice and my words to marry the beat. I go with the rhythm of it and the words start to come to my mind and those words could be based on things that's been on my mind for the past year, the past month, the past week, whatever; I write it."
"We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all."
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
"Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would."
"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."
"I don’t like writing for comedians. I like writing for actors. The best comedians are the best actors."
"Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high."
"A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world."
"Some writing and production projects will be a great way to spend my elderly rock years."
"I love to write. It's my first love."
"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."
"I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money."
"Thoughts are created in the act of writing. [It is a myth that] you must have something to say in order to write. Reality: You often need to write in order to have anything to say. Thought comes with writing, and writing may never come if it is postponed until we are satisfied that we have something to say...The assertion of write first, see what you had to say later applies to all manifestations of written language, to letters...as well as to diaries and journals"
"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own unorthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."
"Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing."
"My dreams are the usual incoherent nonsense. Like most writers, at some point in my career I thought, well, I have these great dreams but I always forget them in the morning so I’ll leave a pad on my bedside table so I can write it down, and then you have some incredible dream and you write it down and the next morning you wake up and you’ve written ‘purple socks’."
