Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 141

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 141 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
Collection: Writing
Image of William Safire
It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
- William Safire
Collection: Writing
Image of William Safire
Why use a modifier to set straight a not-quite-right noun when the right noun is available?
- William Safire
Collection: Writing
Image of A. A. Milne
What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.
- A. A. Milne
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
It's a feeling of happiness that knocks me clean out of adjectives. I think sometimes that the best reason for writing novels is to experience those four and a half hours after you write the final word.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
The young people have a phrase for this now, which is "slay in your lane." That's a very important principle of writing. You have to work out what it is you can't do, obscure it, and focus on what works.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of J. K. Rowling
I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.
- J. K. Rowling
Collection: Writing
Image of J. K. Rowling
I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn't yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, "What shall I write about next?". It just came, fully formed.
- J. K. Rowling
Collection: Writing
Image of J. K. Rowling
I loved writing Dumbledore and he is the epitome of goodness.
- J. K. Rowling
Collection: Writing
Image of Elie Wiesel
Acutely aware of the poverty of my means, language became obstacle. At every page I thought, 'That's not it.' So I began again with other verbs and other images. No, that wasn't it either. But what exactly was that it I was searching for? It must have been all that eludes us, hidden behind a veil so as not to be stolen, usurped and trivialized. Words seemed weak and pale.
- Elie Wiesel
Collection: Writing
Image of Elie Wiesel
And to write is to sow and to reap at the same time.
- Elie Wiesel
Collection: Writing
Image of Camille Paglia
Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.
- Camille Paglia
Collection: Writing
Image of Donald Trump
Hillary Clinton`s plan would trigger a constitutional crisis unlike almost anything we have ever seen before. In effect, she would be abolishing the law-making powers of Congress in order to write her own laws from the Oval Office. And you see what bad judgment she has. She has seriously bad judgment.
- Donald Trump
Collection: Writing
Image of Rita Rudner
Men who write love letters don't live in this century.
- Rita Rudner
Collection: Writing
Image of Nicholas Sparks
When I write to you, I feel your breath; when you read them, I imagine you feel mine. Is it that way with you too? These letters are part of us now, part of our history, a reminder forever that we made it through this time. Thank you for helping me survive this year, but more than that, thank you in advance for all the years to come.
- Nicholas Sparks
Collection: Writing
Image of Wole Soyinka
There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda.
- Wole Soyinka
Collection: Writing
Image of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of Joyce Carol Oates
The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.
- Joyce Carol Oates
Collection: Writing
Image of James Wolcott
The Internet and blogging made writing somewhat more solitary and more splintered. It removes the whole sense of the magazine as an organism. A certain dynamism. At The Village Voice, there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers. The New Yorker used to be notorious for everything that went on, sexual intrigues and people had individual offices, they could close the door and take a bottle out of their bottom drawer or have sex on their desk.
- James Wolcott
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Bringhurst
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
- Robert Bringhurst
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Bringhurst
Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
- Robert Bringhurst
Collection: Writing
Image of Gao Xingjian
If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality.
- Gao Xingjian
Collection: Writing
Image of Gao Xingjian
For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.
- Gao Xingjian
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Savage
I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.
- Dan Savage
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Greene
If you're meant to do something like writing and you end up going into banking or finance, your going to be miserable. You're trying to fit something into a square peg and a round hole. It's just never going to work.
- Robert Greene
Collection: Writing
Image of Henry Miller
If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Henry Miller
You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.
- Henry Miller
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Sontag
I write essays first because I have a passionate relationship to the subject and second because the subject is one that people are not talking about.
- Susan Sontag
Collection: Writing
Image of Sylvia Townsend Warner
I do apologize for writing by hand - and so badly. I shall soon be like Helen Thomas, notoriously illegible. In her last letter only two words stood out plain: 'Blood pressure.' Subsequent research demonstrated that what she had actually written was 'Beloved friends.
- Sylvia Townsend Warner
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Benchley
If you are one of the hewers of wood and drawers of small weekly paychecks, your letters will have to contain some few items of news or they will be accounted dry stuff.... But if you happen to be of a literary turn of mind, or are, in any way, likely to become famous, you may settle down to an afternoon of letter-writing on nothing more sprightly in the way of news than the shifting of the wind from south to south-east.
- Robert Benchley
Collection: Writing
Image of Anna Quindlen
It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
- Anna Quindlen
Collection: Writing
Image of Paolo Bacigalupi
We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.
- Paolo Bacigalupi
Collection: Writing
Image of Patti Smith
I didn't write about aspects of my public life because that's a small part of my life.
- Patti Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Hunter S. Thompson
There is no story unless you've written it.
- Hunter S. Thompson
Collection: Writing
Image of Jean Rhys
When I think about it, if I had to choose, I'd rather be happy than write.
- Jean Rhys
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
I think it's basically the same game, although with a public figure like [Donald] Trump I think you are bound to consider the public persona rather than the private one. At least that was the case with that piece of writing.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of Napoleon Bonaparte
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Collection: Writing
Image of John Boyne
I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.
- John Boyne
Collection: Writing
Image of Christopher Paolini
Eragon started as me but ended up evolving into his very own character, .. Even as he has gone through his coming- of- age story, the process of writing and publishing these novels has been my own coming- of- age story. There are parallels between my own experience and Eragon's, but fortunately, I don't have people charging at me with swords.
- Christopher Paolini
Collection: Writing
Image of Christopher Paolini
In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.
- Christopher Paolini
Collection: Writing
Image of Jacques Barzun
Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way
- Jacques Barzun
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Twain
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
- Mark Twain
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Twain
It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off.
- Mark Twain
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Orlean
I really believed that anything at all was worth writing about if you cared about it enough, and that the best and only necessary justification for writing any particular story was that I cared about it.
- Susan Orlean
Collection: Writing
Image of Jenny Lawson
When someone writes something hateful and threatening I respond with something like, "I want to be so much like you; I want to wear your skin." By messing with them in that way you change what they're selling. They won't share it. And it halts the conversation. Or I'll change it to "Jenny, you're like a rose bush that grew a watermelon." They come back pissed off and write, "I didn't say that!"
- Jenny Lawson
Collection: Writing
Image of Grace Paley
To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night.
- Grace Paley
Collection: Writing