Writing Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The critics have been writing me off for 20 years. That's nothing new. As far as I know I still have plenty of fans and sell lots of records. Do I care what critics say about me? No, and I don't read reviews.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Ernest Hemingway

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The difficulty in the way of writing a children's play is that Barrie was born too soon. Many people must have felt the same about Shakespeare. We who came later have no chance. What fun to have been Adam, and to have had the whole world of plots and jokes and stories at one's disposal.

The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.

Ernest Hemingway

They are Man's and they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance and this girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased.

Charles Dickens

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

Ernest Hemingway

In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

Theodor W. Adorno

Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Ernest Hemingway

This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.

Leonardo da Vinci

In the long run, however little you talk or even think about it, the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

Raymond Chandler

I wanted just a song to sing, and there came a certain point where I couldn't sing anything. So I had to write what I wanted to sing 'cos nobody else was writing what I wanted to sing.

And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.

In writing songs I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair... Come to it any way but lightly.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

The actual writing is what you live for. The rest is something you have to get through in order to arrive at the point.

Raymond Chandler

My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.

Ernest Hemingway

The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

Thomas Jefferson