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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"My plays are always involved with society, but I'm writing about people, too, and it's clear over the years that audiences understand them and care about them. The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don't really change that much."
"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to."
"The best style is the style you don't notice."
"I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake."
"Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him."
"Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process."
"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."
"The story is not in the plot but in the telling."
"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
"Writing 'We Are Never Getting Back Together' was one of the most hilarious experiences I have ever had in the studio because it just happened so naturally."
"James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself."
"A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!"
"Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first."
"He that writes to himself writes to an eternal public."
"I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair."
"Read over your compositions and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
"Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does."
"And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence."
