Writing Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Writing.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books.

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

Reading Writing

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesit

Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.

Women Inspirational Writing Intellectual Freedom

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than d

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

Writing

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is co

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing the

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Ernest Hemingway

Time Words Writing Thetimes

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, whi

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Beauty Writing Colour

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

Reading Writing

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retr

It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

Writing Retreats Writing Class

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Creativity Drugs Writing

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colon

My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.

Writing College Semi Colons

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do i

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

Writing

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale i

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Writing Craft Writing Life

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no on

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Writing

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion

Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.

Style Soul Passion Writing Prose Walter Pater

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices tha

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

Writing

So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and

So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

Advice Writing

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

Writing

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the tru

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Ernest Hemingway

Truth Writing Advice Writing

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin b

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

Christopher Hitchens

Death Independence Writing Book Reviews Nadine Gordimer

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. Peopl

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

Writing Craft