"The conscious mind is the editor, and the subconscious mind is the writer."
Read quote
11 likes
Writing quotes
Writing
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Writing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Writing quotes (page 78 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Why do they put pictures of criminals up in the Post Office? What are we supposed to do, write to them? Why don't they just put their pictures on the postage stamps so the postmen can look for them while they deliver the mail?"
Read quote
11 likes
"Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself."
Read quote
11 likes
"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."
Read quote
11 likes
"I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy."
Read quote
11 likes
"I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness."
Read quote
11 likes
"I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing."
Read quote
11 likes
"Here I was into astronomy, and here into anthropology, and there I go into geology. It was much more fun to be able to research and write about whatever I wanted to."
Read quote
11 likes
"Usually I start with a beat, I start making a beat, and my producer side is making the beat. And on a good day, my rapper side will jump in and start the writing process - maybe come up with a hook or start a verse. Sometimes it just happens like that. A song like 'Lights Please' happens like that."
Read quote
11 likes
"No compulsion in the world is stronger than the urge to edit someone else's document."
Read quote
11 likes
"I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there."
Read quote
11 likes
"Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation."
Read quote
11 likes
"To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life."
Read quote
11 likes
"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell."
Read quote
11 likes
"Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person."
Read quote
11 likes
"I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn't know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing."
Read quote
11 likes
"I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time."
Read quote
11 likes
"I'll go to the south of Sicily in the winter, and paint memories of Arles – I'll buy a piano and Mozart me that – I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life – This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours"
Read quote
11 likes
"I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings."
Read quote
11 likes
"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."
Read quote
11 likes