Writing Quotes

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Benjamin Franklin

I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.
Kanye West

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.
A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.
Socrates

I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: ‘Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.’
Jose Rizal

Cooking is like painting or writing a song. Just as there are only so many notes or colors, there are only so many flavors – it’s how you combine them that sets you apart.
Wolfgang Puck

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.
Marcus Garvey

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
Steven Wright

Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.’
Neil deGrasse Tyson

The heart and soul of good writing is research; you should write not what you know but what you can find out about.
Robert J. Sawyer

When I do have free time, I spend it with friends, or I spend it at home writing or making something.
Billie Eilish

I’m vegan, though not completely religious about it. While writing ‘Sapiens,’ I became familiar with how we treat animals in the meat and dairy industries. I was so horrified that I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
Yuval Noah Harari

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
Ray Bradbury

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.
Lee Iacocca

A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
Mao Zedong

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.
J. K. Rowling

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

Writing the perfect paper is a lot like a military operation. It takes discipline, foresight, research, strategy, and, if done right, ends in total victory.
Ryan Holiday

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day – like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.
Douglas Engelbart

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.
Anne Frank

Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
Marsha Norman

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost

Writing is like sewing together what I call these ‘buttons,’ these bits and pieces.
Sandra Cisneros

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain

Good writing is like a windowpane.
George Orwell

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow

Searching for music is like searching for God. They’re very similar. There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don’t exist.
David Bowie

The more research you do, the more at ease you are in the world you’re writing about. It doesn’t encumber you, it makes you free.
A. S. Byatt

The human bird shall take his first flight, filling the world with amazement, all writings with his fame, and bringing eternal glory to the nest whence he sprang.
Leonardo da Vinci

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. White

Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
Maya Angelou

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Booker T. Washington

The writing process, the way I go about it is I do whatever the beat feels like, whatever the beat is telling me to do. Usually when the beat comes on, I think of a hook or the subject I want to rap about almost instantly. Within four, eight bars of it playing I’m just like, ‘Oh, OK. This is what I wanna do’.
Eminem

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
Stanley Kubrick

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
Gustave Flaubert

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
Graham Greene

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.
Paulo Coelho

Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.
Andre Breton

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
Wole Soyinka

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Moliere

You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
Octavia E. Butler

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
Henri Frederic Amiel

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.
Margaret Atwood

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
Robert A. Heinlein

Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.
Amy Tan

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
Dr. Seuss

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
William Strunk, Jr.

I hate writing about personal stuff. I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.
Elon Musk

Writing is like a ‘lust,’ or like ‘scratching when you itch.’ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
C. S. Lewis

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.
Napoleon Hill

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.
A. B. Yehoshua

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
Charles Kuralt

I’ve always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they’re still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.
George R. R. Martin

A lazy man works twice as hard. My mother told that to me, and now I say it to my kids. If you’re writing an essay, keep it in the lines and in the margins so you don’t have to do it over.
Gary Oldman

Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.
Robin S. Sharma

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Stephen King

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?
Annie Dillard

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, ‘What is real?’ Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.
Philip K. Dick

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.
Meg Rosoff

Letters are something from you. It’s a different kind of intention than writing an e-mail.
Keanu Reeves

The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
Robert Cormier

I have always admired teachers because teaching, like the priesthood, medicine and writing, is a vocation. You don’t become a teacher because you want wealth. It is the same with writing.
F. Sionil Jose

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there’s never a need to erase.
Todd Barry

Singing was probably my first love, and song writing. I write a lot of love songs and heartbreaking songs.
Nolan Sotillo

In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I,’ of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.
Joan Didion

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
Patricia Reilly Giff

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.
Rebecca Solnit

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.
Anais Nin

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
Winston Churchill

There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all.
Oscar Wilde

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Ernest Hemingway

That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.
Truman Capote

It is possible to have a pretty good life and career being a leech and a parasite in the media world, gadding about from TV studio to TV studio, writing inconsequential pieces and having a good time.
Boris Johnson

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.
Alan Moore

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose… anything goes.
Cole Porter

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.
J. M. Coetzee

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.
W. E. B. Du Bois

You don’t want to become guilty of plagiarism by letting someone else’s words get inadvertently mixed in with your own. If you do feel the need to paste in a block of research while you’re writing, be sure to highlight the copied text in a different color so you can go back and remove or rewrite it entirely later.
Gayle Lynds

For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
Theodor W. Adorno

When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.
Charles Bukowski

Stereotypes, they’re sensual, cultural weapons. That’s the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.
Junot Diaz

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I’m almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. Every day, we’re writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that’s made all the difference.
Drew Houston

I was addicted to hacking, more for the intellectual challenge, the curiosity, the seduction of adventure; not for stealing, or causing damage or writing computer viruses.
Kevin Mitnick

I grew up across the street from, you know, the Villarias, which was a great Mexican family there. In fact, there was three houses right across the street from me. So, day and night, I listened to Mexican music, and I’m sure, you know, my guitar playing, singing, writing, whatever, has a lot of Mexican flavor there, but it comes natural.
Willie Nelson

Suspense arises naturally from good writing – it’s not a spice to be added separately.
Leigh Michaels

When Basquiat was hanging out with Madonna and Fab Five Freddy, and all those worlds were colliding, people have to realize hip-hop and the arts were like this ’cause we both were outcasts: we wasn’t allowed inside the galleries or inside Yankee Stadium. We were writing in the street and making music.
Jay-Z

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.
Alan Watts

Learn as much by writing as by reading.
John Dalberg-Acton

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
Mahatma Gandhi

‘Despacito’ was a song that, from the time I started writing it, I felt that its hook was really catchy and powerful but at the same time very simple.
Luis Fonsi

Writing is like travelling. It’s wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.
Langston Hughes

You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
Carl Friedrich Gauss

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile… a stain upon the silence.
Samuel Beckett

Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.
H. P. Lovecraft

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
Quentin Tarantino

If uncovering the truth is the greatest challenge of nonfiction writing, it is also the greatest reward.
Candice Millard

Writing is like any other sort of sport. In order for you to get better at it, you have to exercise the muscle.
Jason Reynolds

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
E. L. Doctorow

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.
Henry Petroski

Sometimes, what’s not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.
Joel Edgerton

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. Somerset Maugham

I don’t want them to read what I’m writing and say, ‘I think that’s right,’ and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Television has raised writing to a new low.
Samuel Goldwyn

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.
C. K. Williams

I’m here to be lovesick, broke and drifting, writing heartache songs and singing about pain and misery and depression, with a few good times here and there.
Hank Williams III

There are different rules for reading, for thinking, and for talking. Writing blends all three of them.
Mason Cooley

It is not Kafka’s fault that his wonderful writings have lately turned into a fad, and are read by people who have neither the ability nor the desire to absorb literature.
Hermann Hesse

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.
John Wayne

In the future, I’d like to continue being honest with myself and admit when I’d be better off asking someone else to illustrate my writing.
Adam Rex

Once I started writing at ‘The Onion’ I was like, oh this is it, this is my dream job, I’ve achieved my dream job.
Megan Ganz

I don’t read blogs. I’m living the life they’re writing about. So why read about it?
Future

I am a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
William Bernbach

I don’t really have a writing process. I don’t write at all but, honestly, I feel like it’s a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it’s almost like something I wrote.
Lil Baby

There’s good movies and there’s bad movies. The genres are never dead, it’s just about how to apply them and articulate them and execute them – the story, the quality of the writing, the acting, the design elements, the directorial execution – all these things make it what it is.
Andy Garcia

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Ray Bradbury

I’ve never been a very prolific person, so when creativity flows, it flows. I find myself scribbling on little notepads and pieces of loose paper, which results in a very small portion of my writings to ever show up in true form.
Kurt Cobain

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.
J. K. Rowling

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
Alain de Botton

You can’t go with the intention of writing something inspirational. You just have to go with the right heart.
Lights

If I don’t feel like writing on a certain day, I just go to the cafe and hang around.
Elizabeth Berg

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
Will Rogers

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
Anna Quindlen