Writing Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Ernest Hemingway

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

The way for a person to develop a [writing] style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

Henry David Thoreau

An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

Abraham Lincoln

In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision.

I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

I find it easy to write songs. I been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren't written out just for the paper; they're written as you can read it, you dig. If you take whatever there is to the song away—the beat, the melody—I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can't do that with either—songs that, if you took the beat and the melody away, they wouldn't stand up because they're not supposed to do that, you know. Songs are songs.

What is good for me is not necessarily good for someone else. Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word. The hesitation between one word and another is filled with many centuries, much space.

The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.

Raymond Chandler

Where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

By writing a horror novel where this inexplicable disorder takes over in our ordered lives, you make order look better by comparison. But below that, there's a part of us that responds to the Who bashing their instruments to pieces on the stage. There's a very primitive part that says, "Do it some more."

In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak judgments by the lustre which they obtain from their union with excellence; but it is the business of those who presume to superintend the taste or morals of mankind to separate delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

Ernest Hemingway

Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the wndow of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.

Ernest Hemingway

In my later years I have looked in the mirror each day and found a happy person staring back. Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don't you? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

Benjamin Franklin