Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 119

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 119 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Paul Simon
Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.
- Paul Simon
Collection: Writing
Image of Christian Nestell Bovee
In general, inquiry ceases when we adopt a theory. After that, we overlook whatever makes against it, and see and think, and talk and write, only in its favor. Indeed, when we have a snug, comfortable theory, to which we are much attached, they appear to us as a very mean set of facts that will not square with it.
- Christian Nestell Bovee
Collection: Writing
Image of John Updike
The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.
- John Updike
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
These are two opposing forces, and whenever I am in active politics, I stop writing. And when I'm writing, I don't politick.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Gore Vidal
I spend most of my time in California. I feel I am fueled by rage and by the political climate there. I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for someone else, but for me it's fuel for my writing.
- Gore Vidal
Collection: Writing
Image of Virginia Woolf
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.
- Virginia Woolf
Collection: Writing
Image of Virginia Woolf
For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
- Virginia Woolf
Collection: Writing
Image of John Steinbeck
A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.
- John Steinbeck
Collection: Writing
Image of John Steinbeck
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
- John Steinbeck
Collection: Writing
Image of Clay Shirky
There are three things you need to be a good writer: you need to read a lot, you need to write a lot, and you need a lot of feedback.
- Clay Shirky
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Edward Abbey
My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
- Edward Abbey
Collection: Writing
Image of John Dos Passos
I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Writing
Image of John Dos Passos
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
- John Dos Passos
Collection: Writing
Image of Saint Francis de Sales
There is no artifice as good and desirable as simplicity.
- Saint Francis de Sales
Collection: Writing
Image of Elsie de Wolfe
To conform within rational limits to a given style is no more servile than to pay one's taxes or to write according to the rule of grammar.
- Elsie de Wolfe
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Sexton
I think I've been writing black poems all along, wearing my white mask. I'm always the victim ... but no longer!
- Anne Sexton
Collection: Writing
Image of David Bowie
I really wanted to do, more than anything else, up until I was around 16, 17, was write musicals.
- David Bowie
Collection: Writing
Image of David Bowie
Someday, I'm gonna write a poem in a letter; Someday, I'm gonna get that faculty together.
- David Bowie
Collection: Writing
Image of John Bolton
As you know, I have over the years written critically about the U.N. I have consistently stressed in my writings that American leadership is critical to the success of the U.N., an effective U.N., one that is true to the original intent of its charter's framers.
- John Bolton
Collection: Writing
Image of Michel de Montaigne
The vulgar and common esteem is seldom happy in hitting right; and I am much mistaken if, amongst the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained the popular applause.
- Michel de Montaigne
Collection: Writing
Image of Sarah Waters
Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.
- Sarah Waters
Collection: Writing
Image of George Orwell
By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
- George Orwell
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Bowen
Dialogue should show the relationships among people.
- Elizabeth Bowen
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Bowen
... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.
- Elizabeth Bowen
Collection: Writing
Image of Elizabeth Bowen
What must novel dialogue . . . really be and do? It must be pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot. During dialogue, the characters confront one another. The confrontation is in itself an occasion. Each one of these occasions, throughout the novel, is unique.
- Elizabeth Bowen
Collection: Writing
Image of Samantha Hunt
In writing I found a way to make silence and to be silent. The short story has a lot more silence than the novel and that is its success.
- Samantha Hunt
Collection: Writing
Image of Darynda Jones
Try writing an entire story with only a thousand words at your disposal. It’s a terrific lesson in economy and precession.
- Darynda Jones
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Ian Black
It's such a deliberate thing to sit down and write a tweet. You're putting yourself out there in a very deliberate way, and over however many tweets, you start to create a character for yourself.
- Michael Ian Black
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Ian Black
The characters that I have on Twitter have very little resemblance to me, the person who's writing them.
- Michael Ian Black
Collection: Writing
Image of Flannery O'Connor
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.
- Flannery O'Connor
Collection: Writing
Image of Flannery O'Connor
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.
- Flannery O'Connor
Collection: Writing
Image of Flannery O'Connor
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head.
- Flannery O'Connor
Collection: Writing
Image of Flannery O'Connor
I know well enough that very few people who are supposedly interested in writing are interested in writing well. They are interested in publishing something, and if possible in making a "killing." They are interested in being a writer not in writing. . . If this is what you are interested in, I am not going to be much use to you.
- Flannery O'Connor
Collection: Writing
Image of China Mieville
When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters.
- China Mieville
Collection: Writing
Image of Petrarch
I desire that death find me ready and writing, or if it please Christ, praying and intears.
- Petrarch
Collection: Writing
Image of David Simon
We are innately creative beings capable of writing a love story worth living, and we cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to experience nourishing relationships.
- David Simon
Collection: Writing
Image of Seth
You don't launch a popular blog, you build one. The writing isn't the hard part, it's the commitment.
- Seth
Collection: Writing
Image of James Blunt
I don't know how to write without thinking what people would want. You don't know whether they want you to be black or white, so you kind of get a gray, something in the middle.
- James Blunt
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Ray Pollock
I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].
- Donald Ray Pollock
Collection: Writing
Image of William Wordsworth
Write to me frequently & the longest letters possible; never mind whether you have facts or no to communicate; fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Tyler
Once your mind is caught on the right snag, there's nothing so hard about the mechanics of writing.
- Anne Tyler
Collection: Writing
Image of Anne Tyler
I write because I want to have more than one life.
- Anne Tyler
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Roth
I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive.
- Philip Roth
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Roth
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.
- Philip Roth
Collection: Writing