Writing Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

People who have taken the [writing] course write eagerly, "Last week I hit "The Country Gentleman"; this week I hit "Mademoiselle"; next week I hope to hit the "American Mother"! Frankly, I don't think this course would suit me; I don't want to hit any of those people, though I might toss a pie at the American Mother, just for fun...

Robertson Davies

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

It rains during the morning. No visitors today. I feel lonely and amuse myself by writing at random. These are the words:
Who mourns makes grief his master.
Who drinks makes pleasure his master.

A definition is as convention-bound as a sonnet and usually more compact. Writing one is considered, at least by anyone who has ever tried it, something of an art.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

The thing about writing is not to talk, but to do it; no matter how bad or even mediocre it is, the process and production is the thing, not the sitting and theorizing about how one should write ideally, or how well one could write if one really wanted to or had the time.

I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book – the unconscious worked on it instead…

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

Alberto Manguel

In my dreams I sign chits and file papers, Nikoros muttered. Then I awake to sign real chits and file real papers. I imagine my grave marker will be carved as a writing desk. 'Here lies Nikoros Via Lupa, wifeless and heirless, but gods how he could alphabetize!'

I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end of my career, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had spent my life making the world a worse place.

On why he decided against writing proprietary software

Richard Stallman

There's always rhythm going in my mind. … I'm either singing them — June will tell you, I'm either singing them, or I have got the beat going from one, or I'm writing one.

The contemplation of anything intelligent — it need not be writing — helps the mind through the black hours. Mozart, for example; music light bright ice water, or say, the memory of the serene Palladian lines of Jefferson's Monticello. These things realign the mind and teach it not to be petty. All honest thought is a form of prayer.

In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits.

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can.

Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.

I was TORTURED by teachers! You hear me, TORTURED! I yelled, jerking the whole podium off the floor. Hell, I flunked the third grade twice because—BECAUSE— I was crying so hard that I had to wipe the tears out of my eyes with the back of my hand, but this wasn't going to stop me. I was all guts up front now. I was in that smooth-feeling, all-true place that I got into when I'd go to my room and start writing each morning before daybreak…with all my heart and soul.

Victor Villaseñor

My hand is very tired but I want to go on writing. I keep resting and thinking. All day I have been two people - the me imprisoned in yesterday and the me out here on the mound; and now there is a third me trying to get in - the me in what is going to happen next.

I think that what drives the American public, which is like a huge, lumbering beast, is anger; and the other thing that drives it is self–interest. What I'm trying to do in my books is different from other people writing about child abuse. I'm not trying to engender sympathy so much as to say to the public, 'Today's victim is tomorrow's predator.' The things that you fear have a genesis, and the price of being safe in this world is early intervention. It costs you something to look away, not just in moral terms, but in practical terms.

It is as if the right words, the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out. Writing this way is a little like milking a cow: the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market — you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Elizabeth Bowen

I see people who write characters who are loonies and make them convincing and believable, and I envy them tremendously. I don't really understand them. It's funny, because I've created my own monster. In the 'Great War' and 'American Empire' books, I'm writing the person who is the functional equivalent of Adolf Hitler. I'm inside his head — and that's a very strange place for somebody who thinks of himself as a fairly rational fellow to be. That's alarming

Harry Turtledove

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion.

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."