"The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds."
Read quote
9 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 96 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box."
Read quote
9 likes
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems."
Read quote
9 likes
"If you want to grow in writing songs that will express the wonders of God, immerse yourself in God."
Read quote
9 likes
"I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me."
Read quote
9 likes
"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."
Read quote
9 likes
"For me, songwriting is something that I have to do ritually. I don't just wait for inspiration; I try to write a little bit every day."
Read quote
9 likes
"If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you've got. Just don't plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living."
Read quote
9 likes
"Writing is the only thing I've ever done with persistence, except for being married."
Read quote
9 likes
"A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters."
Read quote
9 likes
"I would love to meet J.K. Rowling and tell her how much I admire her writing and am amazed by her imagination. I read every 'Harry Potter' book as it came out and looked forward to each new one. I am rereading them now with my kids and enjoying them every bit as much. She made me look at jelly beans in a whole new way."
Read quote
9 likes
"Writers will happen in the best of families."
Read quote
9 likes
"Only a woman can write what it is to feel as a woman, to be a woman."
Read quote
9 likes
"History-writing is not a visit of condolence."
Read quote
9 likes
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."
Read quote
9 likes
"I'm sort of a pressure writer. If somebody says, "Stan, write something," and I have to have it by tomorrow morning, I'll just sit down and I'll write it. It always seems to come to me. But I'm better doing a rushed job because if it isn't something that's due quickly, I won't work on it until it becomes almost an emergency and then I'll do it."
Read quote
9 likes
"I'm excited about silver because as I write, it's relatively inexpensive. I'm also excited about silver because -- unlike real estate, which can require a lot of money, some finance skills, lots of due diligence and property management skills to do well -- silver is affordable to the masses, and management skills are minimum."
Read quote
9 likes
"It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions for these are our issues, not nature's."
Read quote
9 likes
"To write is human, to edit is divine."
Read quote
9 likes
"I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
Read quote
9 likes