Writing Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Francis Bacon

Edgar Allan Poe

Poul Anderson

Sharron Angle

Sholem Asch

Annie Besant

Georges Bizet

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

There are few cases in which mere popularity should be considered a proper test of merit; but the case of song-writing is, I think, one of the few.

Edgar Allan Poe

The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

This writer, who is horribly perspicacious and vigorous, demonstrates the certainty of a great European war, and regards it with the peculiar satisfaction excited by such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way of assuring the event.

The only rule I have found to have any validity in writing is not to bore yourself.

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.

I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true. It might seem strange that a man who has dealt in words and emotions and ideas for nearly fifty years shouldn't have a few to spare, so to speak. But everything of value about me is in my books. Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will — with luck — come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise. That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyze yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people, as no historical reconstruction can.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets - an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.

Fredric Jameson

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

Edward Dahlberg

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Haruki Murakami

As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy... Translation is very much like copying paintings.

Boris Pasternak

In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.

The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.

John Galsworthy

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.