Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 128

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 128 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Gertrude Stein
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
- Gertrude Stein
Collection: Writing
Image of Gertrude Stein
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
- Gertrude Stein
Collection: Writing
Image of Tennessee Williams
I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
- Tennessee Williams
Collection: Writing
Image of Henry Miller
Writing is its own reward.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Fay Weldon
Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.
- Fay Weldon
Collection: Writing
Image of Anais Nin
I write emotional algebra.
- Anais Nin
Collection: Writing
Image of Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.
- Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Collection: Writing
Image of Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Collection: Writing
Image of Marguerite Yourcenar
Translating is writing.
- Marguerite Yourcenar
Collection: Writing
Image of Marguerite Yourcenar
Writing is a perpetual choice between a thousand expressions, none of which satisfies me, none of which, above all, satisfies me without the others. Yet I ought to know that only music permits a succession of chords.
- Marguerite Yourcenar
Collection: Writing
Image of Esa-Pekka Salonen
Sometimes you spend nine months, 10 months, a year writing a piece that you will hear two years later or something like that, and you never see anybody. It's a very different sort of metabolic.
- Esa-Pekka Salonen
Collection: Writing
Image of Ashley Montagu
Because women live creatively, they rarely experience the need to depict or write about that which to them is a primary experience and which men know only at a second remove. Women create naturally, men create artificially.
- Ashley Montagu
Collection: Writing
Image of Mary Ruefle
Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
- Mary Ruefle
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvester Stallone
If I'd succeeded right away at acting I wouldn't have sought out writing.
- Sylvester Stallone
Collection: Writing
Image of Luigi Pirandello
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
- Luigi Pirandello
Collection: Writing
Image of George Will
Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.
- George Will
Collection: Writing
Image of George Will
Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."
- George Will
Collection: Writing
Image of Joy Behar
It seemed like the right time. You reach a point when you say to yourself, ‘Do I want to keep doing this?’ There are other things on my plate I want to do — I’ve been writing a play, I’ve been neglecting my standup.
- Joy Behar
Collection: Writing
Image of Edward Abbey
I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.
- Edward Abbey
Collection: Writing
Image of Thomas Merton
My best writing has always been in journals.
- Thomas Merton
Collection: Writing
Image of Jeannette Walls
When I got a little older, I started writing for the high school newspaper, The Maroon Wave, and that's when I fell in love with journalism.
- Jeannette Walls
Collection: Writing
Image of Gloria Steinem
I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.
- Gloria Steinem
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Trump
The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.
- Donald Trump
Collection: Writing
Image of Patrick Rothfuss
I'm just very careful with my words when I write. Obsessively careful. I'm the sort of person who worries about the difference between "slim" and "slender."
- Patrick Rothfuss
Collection: Writing
Image of Patrick Rothfuss
I was nervous about writing Slow Regard.
- Patrick Rothfuss
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Orlean
Writing about someone well known removes that obligation of defending it as a subject, but it also means that some of the surprise and freshness is already gone. It's so different - in some ways much harder for me.
- Susan Orlean
Collection: Writing
Image of Rick Riordan
Two hundred Romans, and no one’s got a pen? Never mind!" He slung his M16 onto his back and pulled out a hand grenade. There were many screaming Romans. Then the hand grenade morphed into a ballpoint pen, and Mars began to write. Frank looked at Percy with wide eyes. He mouthed: Can your sword do grenade form? Percy mouthed back, No. Shut up.
- Rick Riordan
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
As far as which writers embody this form of gentle power - Tobias Wolff, for sure. His persona and his writing both share an easy, capacious confidence that says he has faith in his readers.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
There are things that are shadow sides of the creative energy that are negative and all that kind of stuff. The only thing that I say to myself is, in the spirit of that quote from the Gnostic Gospels: Writing is a way to let all that stuff out into the sun.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
The one thing fiction and non-fiction writing have in common for me is that sense of trying to get the sentences to be minimal but at the same time be a little overfull - to encourage them to do a kind of poetic work.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of David Ogilvy
Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock.
- David Ogilvy
Collection: Writing
Image of Dennis Miller
The White House again refused to turn over discussions Vice President Cheney had with Enron officials over energy policy. Cheney said if he had to disclose every time some business donated a ton of money then came in to write its own policy to govern itself, he wouldn't get any work done.
- Dennis Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of John Desmond Bernal
In my own field, x-ray crystallography, we used to work out the structure of minerals by various dodges which we never bothered to write down, we just used them. Then Linus Pauling came along to the laboratory, saw what we were doing and wrote out what we now call Pauling's Rules. We had all been using Pauling's Rules for about three or four years before Pauling told us what the rules were.
- John Desmond Bernal
Collection: Writing
Image of Eloisa James
Some say writing is its own reward. I write for money, but writing for money is not so bad, especially when that writing brings you joy.
- Eloisa James
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Roth
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.
- Philip Roth
Collection: Writing
Image of Marilynne Robinson
Characters more or less present themselves to me. I don't know their origins. I think if I did, if I seemed to myself to fabricate them, I could not induce suspension of disbelief in myself in the way writing fiction requires.
- Marilynne Robinson
Collection: Writing
Image of Patti Smith
I've always had a desire to write something and capture people's imagination like Peter Pan had captured mine.
- Patti Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Edgar Allan Poe
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
- Edgar Allan Poe
Collection: Writing
Image of Orhan Pamuk
Nothing changed in my life since I work all the time," Pamuk said then. "I've spent 30 years writing fiction. For the first 10 years I worried about money and no one asked me how much money I made. The second decade I spent money and no one was asking me about that. And I've spent the last 10 years with everyone expecting to hear how I spend the money, which I will not do.
- Orhan Pamuk
Collection: Writing
Image of Leo Tolstoy
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
- Leo Tolstoy
Collection: Writing
Image of Isaac Bashevis Singer
Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.
- Isaac Bashevis Singer
Collection: Writing
Image of Rudolf Steiner
I ask you to write this deeply into your souls . . . the materialistic culture . . . is now on the way to its close.
- Rudolf Steiner
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Wolfe
(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.
- Tom Wolfe
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Bjork
I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.
- Bjork
Collection: Writing