Top Writing Quotes Collection - Page 152

Discover a curated collection of Writing quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category. Page 152 provides more Writing quotes.

Image of Elie Wiesel
Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?
- Elie Wiesel
Collection: Writing
Image of Dani Shapiro
I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.
- Dani Shapiro
Collection: Writing
Image of Dani Shapiro
My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
- Dani Shapiro
Collection: Writing
Image of Susan Elizabeth Phillips
E-mail creates the illusion that you're writing. You're not.
- Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Collection: Writing
Image of Blaise Pascal
Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.
- Blaise Pascal
Collection: Writing
Image of E. O. Wilson
In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.
- E. O. Wilson
Collection: Writing
Image of Laurence Sterne
I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.
- Laurence Sterne
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Michelle Rodriguez
I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something.
- Michelle Rodriguez
Collection: Writing
Image of Moliere
One can be well-bred and write bad poetry
- Moliere
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
Try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Zadie Smith
The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.
- Zadie Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Lauren DeStefano
The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.
- Lauren DeStefano
Collection: Writing
Image of Alice Walker
I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.
- Alice Walker
Collection: Writing
Image of J. R. R. Tolkien
grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.
- J. R. R. Tolkien
Collection: Writing
Image of Freida Pinto
I find it very hard to say yes or no quite openly, because people are never satisfied. One day they write us off as saying we're not together and the next day we're together and getting married.
- Freida Pinto
Collection: Writing
Image of Nicholas Sparks
My novels are in the literature section as opposed to the romance section of bookstores because they're not romance novels. If I tried to have them published as romances, they'd be rejected. I write dramatic fiction; a further sub-genre would classify them as love stories.
- Nicholas Sparks
Collection: Writing
Image of Nicholas Sparks
I'm a novelist at heart. My sole intention is to write the best novel possible. I don't think about the film potential at all.
- Nicholas Sparks
Collection: Writing
Image of Isaac Newton
As I am writing, another illustration of ye generation of hills proposed above comes into my mind. Milk is as uniform a liquor as ye chaos was. If beer be poured into it & ye mixture let stand till it be dry, the surface of ye curdled substance will appear as rugged & mountanous as the Earth in any place.
- Isaac Newton
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Savage
When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.
- Dan Savage
Collection: Writing
Image of Dan Savage
You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.
- Dan Savage
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Kurt Vonnegut
That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.
- Kurt Vonnegut
Collection: Writing
Image of Mark Twain
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
- Mark Twain
Collection: Writing
Image of Arundhati Roy
In India, whichever language you write in, the possibility of people not understanding irony or not understanding [remains there]. This as a writer is most terrifying!
- Arundhati Roy
Collection: Writing
Image of Winona Ryder
I binge-watched this show Damages. Glenn Close and Rose Byrne are so good. Lily Tomlin is in it. You see all these great actors and the writing is terrific. There are a lot of shows like that. And there are all these conversations right now about roles for women and being paid equally and all of that, but I think what it really is, is opportunity.
- Winona Ryder
Collection: Writing
Image of Orhan Pamuk
When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free.
- Orhan Pamuk
Collection: Writing
Image of Orhan Pamuk
A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.
- Orhan Pamuk
Collection: Writing
Image of Leo Tolstoy
Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.
- Leo Tolstoy
Collection: Writing
Image of Marilynne Robinson
Never, ever condescend to the reader. Assume you are writing for someone better and smarter than you are. This will protect you from conventionalism, faddishness, and cliché.
- Marilynne Robinson
Collection: Writing
Image of Robert Benchley
Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.
- Robert Benchley
Collection: Writing
Image of Philip Roth
I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.
- Philip Roth
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Robbins
Being able to create your own work, being able to indulge your own fantasies is so much better than journalism, so much more fulfilling than journalism, to me, that as long as I can continue to write fiction, I shall.
- Tom Robbins
Collection: Writing
Image of Tom Robbins
I work with pen and paper. That's my favorite way to write. I love the way the ink sinks into the wood, soaks into the wood pulp. There's something about that process that's so organic.
- Tom Robbins
Collection: Writing
Image of Patti Smith
After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.
- Patti Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Patti Smith
If I'm really working on something, writing or painting or really concentrating, I don't even think about brushing my hair.
- Patti Smith
Collection: Writing
Image of Randall Munroe
Once I got married, I started working from an office. I found that having somewhere to go that isn't my house is mentally helpful: 'This is the place where I answer email and write blog posts,' and 'over there is the place where I do the dishes.
- Randall Munroe
Collection: Writing
Image of David Sedaris
Maybe one day, I would write a story about arguing in public, and those would come in handy in some way.
- David Sedaris
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
My theory for nonfiction is that nobody can be free of some kind of conceptions about whatever story they're writing. But if you can find a way to build those into the story, then the story becomes a process of deconstructing and heightening and sometimes changing those notions and that makes dramatic tension. The initial statement of your position, and then letting reality act on you to change it, is pretty good storytelling.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
If you start with the idea that you are going to be writing about a night in a graveyard, and that there are only a few living people in that frame, all sorts of interesting and difficult technical problems arise. And then form - new form, or experimental form - might be understood as just trying to tell that story most movingly and efficiently.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of George Saunders
I don't know how you feel, but I feel like writing, clarity of thought, and truth have been validated because we see what happens when we get lax in those areas. I'm excited by the idea that writers like us can actually reach out and try to understand and prod and agitate the people who are in support of Trump because we have the tools to do it. We're language people and we're idea people.
- George Saunders
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Pollan
My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me.
- Michael Pollan
Collection: Writing
Image of Michael Pollan
Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.
- Michael Pollan
Collection: Writing
Image of Serena Williams
I'm currently writing a screenplay that I haven't started yet.
- Serena Williams
Collection: Writing
Image of Patrick Rothfuss
I have a blog where I keep in touch with my fans. I write about things that are important to me. Sometimes on there I'll just tell a little story about the things that happen in my everyday life. People seem to enjoy them well enough.
- Patrick Rothfuss
Collection: Writing