Writing Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

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.

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

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

Nadine Gordimer

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

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

Good authors, too, who once knew better words
Now only use four-letter words
Writing prose —
Anything goes.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

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

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.

I get a fine, warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let's face it, writing is hell.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Dissents speak to a future age. It's not simply to say, 'My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.' But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that's the dissenter's hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Dreams are…illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

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

I write in longhand. I am accustomed to that proximity, that feel of writing. Then I sit down and type. And then I retype, correct, retype, and keep going until it's finished. It's been demonstrated to me many times that there is some inefficiency in this, but I find that the ease of moving a paragraph is not really what I need.

We're the only branch of government that explains itself in writing every time it makes a decision.

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

I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

Robert Penn Warren

The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

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.

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

Haruki Murakami