Quotes about writing
page 7

“Animals are sentient beings who feel pain and suffering, so we are writing that principle into law and ensuring that we protect their welfare. Our plans will also increase sentences for those who commit the most heinous acts of animal cruelty to five years in jail. We are a nation of animal lovers so we will make Brexit work not just for citizens but for the animals we love and cherish too.”

Michael Gove (1967) British politician

Michael Gove: I'll make Brexit work for animals too https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42313313, BBC News, 12 December 2017 <br class="br">2017

Love, Pain, Making love, Law

“May I really say it! All truths are bloody truths to me—take a look at my previous writings.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Notebooks (Summer 1880) 4[271]

Truth

“Throughout his life he would quote and write in his Notebooks chunks of John Donne, Edward Jones, John Betjeman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Dunbar, Shakespeare and his greatest read Dylan Thomas. Dylan became his hero. Sweetly, their paths would later cross and a good friendship would grow.”

Richard Burton (1925–1984) Welsh actor

Biography, in "Life: Richard Burton"

Life, Friendship, Quotes, Reading

“What can I write about Vytautas Juozapaitis?”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Months ago, a singer with this same name gave one of the most Mozartean accounts of Don Giovanni I've ever experienced: a lean, yet warm sound, exciting and a little on the dangerous side - utterly (and wonderfully) self-absorbed. The man singing Giorgio Germont could not possibly have been this same artist. This was Verdi singing of the highest order - as if to the manor born. A molten, rich expressivity and attention to Verdian line that in its size, detail and musicality recalled the greats: Gorin, Merrill... you get the idea. The name may not trip off American tongues with ease... yet, but in an era often thought bereft of Verdian voices Juozapaitis is the real deal. Every moment of his Germont was filled passion and, like all of the cast members, every word of the Italian was naturally produced and understandable. Mama mia this man's got it! <br class="br">Paolo Padillo, "A Traviata of Note: Teatro Lirico d'Europa". Opera - L (March, 2004) http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0403d&L=opera-l&F=&S=&P=15287

“No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Help, Heart

“All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler."”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.
Source: The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 9

Guy, Drawing

“My soul being taught of God, I discerned that the former class of writings lead to condemnation, but that these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants, while they give us, not indeed what we had not before received, but what we had received but were pre vented by error from retaining.”

Tatian (120–180) Syrian writer

Ante-Nicene Christian Library: v. 3 p. 34
Address to the Greeks

God, World, Error, Soul

“You have already heard that the Quakers date their epoch from Christ, who, according to them, was the first Quaker. Religion, say they, was corrupted almost immediately after His death, and remained in that state of corruption about sixteen hundred years. But there were always a few of the faithful concealed in the world, who carefully preserved the sacred fire, which was extinguished in all but themselves; till at length this light shone out in England in 1642.
It was at the time when Great Britain was distracted by intestine wars, which three or four sects had raised in the name of God, that one George Fox, a native of Leicestershire, and son of a silk-weaver, took it into his head to preach the Word, and, as he pretended, with all the requisites of a true apostle; that is, without being able either to read or write. He was a young man, about twenty-five years of age, of irreproachable manners, and religiously mad. He was clad in leather from head to foot, and travelled from one village to another, exclaiming against the war and the clergy.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

The History of the Quakers (1762)

Death, God, War, Age

“The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy — or, indeed, almost any white boy — would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)

Bad luck, Health, Law, Way

“It is because of identity politics – we are, sadly, becoming more tribal. The expectation seems to be that a writer from each tribe must tell the story of that tribe. I’m Turkish but also many other things. For me, imagination is a desire to transcend boundaries. When we write, we can be multiple.”

Elif Shafak (1971) Turkish writer

On being expected to just write stories about sad Muslims in “Elif Shafak: ‘When women are divided it is the male status quo that benefits’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/05/elif-shafak-turkey-three-daughters-of-eve-interview in The Guardian (2017 Feb 5)

Imagination

“That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing — from reading.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Faulkner in the University, p. 117
Faulkner in the University (1959)

Way, Learning, Reading

“Once I dreamed I'd write songs.”

David Miedzianik (1956) British writer

A Season of Changes

Dreams

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

Douglas Engelbart (1925–2013) American engineer and inventor

“I must admit that I am always perplexed when reading quotes and other writings that true love should be unconditional. Well, how about betrayal? Shouldn’t that be a condition? It is for me and should be for you.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1997

Love, Making love, Quotes, Betrayal

“The first of these blessed charlatans to talk about God or religion will be condemned to being jeered at, scoffed at, covered with mud at all crossroads of the major French towns. If that scoundrel breaks that same law a second time, he will be locked away in an eternal prison. Let the most insulting blasphemies, the most atheistic writings be fully authorized, so that we may completely extirpate those horrifying toys of our childhoods from human hearts and memories. Let us hold a contest to find at last the text most capable of Enlightening Europeans about such a major subject; and let a substantial prize be established by the Nation as recompense for the man who, having said and proved everything about his theme, will leave his compatriots only a sickle to shatter all these phantoms and a straightforward heart to detest them.”

Marquis de Sade Philosophy in the Bedroom

Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)

God, Religion, Law, Memory

“Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.”

Natalie Goldberg book Writing Down the Bones

Essay, "Original detail". p.45
Writing Down the Bones (1986)

Life, Way

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, he said, but that's normal, because 'a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Original: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/859221-the-media-only-writes-about-the-sinners-and-the-scandals

Tree

“We don’t really take any stance with one side, we tell the story how we are told it. If you suggest we were writing about your great grandfather and you send the story, that’s how we would tell it. So, but we will put our own emotions and point of view towards it.”

Pär Sundström (1981) Swedish bassist

INTERVIEW: Pär Sundström – Sabaton https://distortedsoundmag.com/interview-par-sundstrom-sabaton/ (March 3, 2016)

“Making or writing a movie, to me, is like building a watch because a watch is so small and you only can fit so many things inside it that all the pieces really do need to work together.”

William Eubank (1982) American film director

[Eubank, William, Ash Thorp, Episode 182 — William Eubank, Interview (event occurs at 43:37–43:50), https://www.thecollectivepodcast.com/episodes/182-william-eubank, MP3; 1h 44m, The Collective Podcast, Los Angeles, California, June 25, 2018, 2018, June]

“So I kept pulling my punches. And later I realised that was a mistake. Life doesn’t spare the kind of people who I write about, so I felt like it would be dishonest to spare my characters in that way.”

Jesmyn Ward (1977) American writer

Source: On how she “protected” her characters in her first novel Where the Line Bleeds in “Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/11/jesmyn-ward-home-mississippi-living-with-addiction-poverty-racism in The Guardian (2018 May 11)

Life, People, Way

“If I told you that a flower bloomed in a dark room, would you trust it?
I mean I write poems in these songs dedicated to you
When you're in the mood for empathy, there's blood in my pen
Better yet where your friends and them?”

Kendrick Lamar (1987) American rapper, songwriter and record producer from California

Poetic Justice.
Source: Song lyrics, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012)

Flowers, Mood

“Just as the ancient sutras, the writings contained within this book are sacred and have come out of a state of consciousness we may call stillness. Unlike those ancient sutras, however, they don’t belong to any one religion or spiritual tradition, but are immediately accessible to the whole of humanity. There is also an added sense of urgency here. The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Source: Stillness Speaks (2003), intro

Books, Religion, Sense

“Doing what is for the good of the people, this must be the truest criterion of right government, in accordance with which the wise and good man will govern the affairs of his subjects. Just as the captain of a ship keeps watch for what is at any moment for the good of the vessel and the sailors, not by writing rules, but by making his science his law, and thus preserves his fellow voyagers, so may not a right government be established in the same way by men who could rule by this principle, making science more powerful than the laws? And whatever the wise rulers do, they can commit no error, so long as they maintain one great principle and by always dispensing absolute justice to them with wisdom and science are able to preserve the citizens and make them better than they were, so far as that is possible.”

Plato book Statesman

296d-297b
Statesman

Wisdom, Men, People, Justice

“The silence of a great writer says more than the writing of the greatest dilettante.”

Teodor Burnar

Silence

This quote waiting for review.

“One writes from what one lives, but also from what hurts.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Manuel Raya Escritor. (2026, 21 marzo). ENTREVISTA AL ESCRITOR CHILENO JOSÉ BAROJA 🇨🇱✍🏼 [Vídeo]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBrHyubZCFM

Hurt

This quote waiting for review.

“The pleasure is not really in writing, it is in reading.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Manuel Raya Escritor. (2026, 21 marzo). ENTREVISTA AL ESCRITOR CHILENO JOSÉ BAROJA 🇨🇱✍🏼 [Vídeo]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBrHyubZCFM

Pleasure, Reading

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Elmore Leonard (1925–2013) American novelist and screenwriter

Newsweek (April 22, 1985)
Source: Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

Source: The Red Headed League

Time

“If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Books, Reading, Night

“It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Books

“Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) American novelist, short story writer and poet

Life, World

“When you're old enough to write a book for children, by then you'll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you're an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

Children, Books

“Writing is one of the most solitary activities in the world.”

Paulo Coelho book The Zahir

Source: The Zahir

World

“Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”

Pico Iyer (1957) British writer

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Heart

“Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

The Devil's Dictionary (1911)
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

Books, Faith, Religion, Falseness

“Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Books

“All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Feeling

“Let us tenderly and kindly cherish therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

1760s, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)
Source: The Works Of John Adams, Second President Of The United States

Knowledge, Thinking, Reading

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

Source: On Writing

Learning, Reading, Parting

“Writing is hard…. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.”

Cheryl Strayed book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Thinking

“I don't want to be a writer so I can write about my life. I want to be a writer to escape from it.

+ Then you shouldn't be a writer.”

Candace Bushnell book The Carrie Diaries

Source: The Carrie Diaries

Life

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Fools, Reading

“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

Law

“By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Support, Time

“Even as she'd been writing it, she wondered if she was using too many exclamation marks, but she was glad she left them in. Nothing says "all is good in the world" like exclamation marks, after all.”

Derek Landy (1974) Irish children's writer

Source: Kingdom of the Wicked

World

“Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.”

Carolyn See (1934–2016) American writer

World, Change

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Variant: Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

“Ah men,
why do you want
all this attention?
I can write poems for myself, make
love to a doorknob if absolutely
necessary. What do you have to offer me
I can't find otherwise
except humiliation? Which I no longer
need.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Love, Men, Making love

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Books, Tree

“Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”

Jim Henson (1936–1990) American puppeteer

Life, Motivational, Deep, Success

“Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world
acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.”

Patrick Califia-Rice (1954) American writer

Variant: Why do I write? I write because I have to, because it is all I know, because it is my truth, because I am compelled, because I am driven to make the world acknowledge that women like me exist, and we possess a dangerous wisdom.

Wisdom, Women, Truth, World

“Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.”

Sidney Sheldon (1917–2007) American writer

People, Books, Sleep

“If you want to write a negative review, don't tickle me gently with your aesthetic displeasure about my work. Unleash the goddamn Kraken."

[on, July 17, 2012]”

Scott Lynch (1978) American writer

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

Truth

“If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

“It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Personality

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

As quoted in Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of ... (2004) by James D. Denney, p. 124 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1884956041

World, Time, Loneliness

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Personality

“When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

“Changing the world is good for those who want their names in books. But being happy, that is for those who write their names in the lives of others, and hold the hearts of others as the treasure most dear.”

Orson Scott Card book Children of the Mind

Source: Children of the Mind

Happiness, Books, World, Change

“I need to write down my observations. Even the tiniest ones; they're the most important.”

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) Finnish children's writer and illustrator

Source: Art in Nature

“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 book Gift from the Sea

Source: Gift from the Sea

Flowers, Sense

“Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Business, Time, Reading

“My pen.’ Funny, I wrote that without noticing. ‘The torch’, ‘the paper’, but ‘my pen’. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It’s about the most important thing I own.”

John Marsden (1950) author

Source: The Dead of Night

Heart

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”

Ray Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing

Source: Zen in the Art of Writing

Exercises

“Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.”

Lewis Black (1948) American stand-up comedian, author, playwright, social critic and actor

Thinking

“It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic

“Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.”

Sarah Dessen book This Lullaby

Variant: She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.
Source: This Lullaby

“Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it.”

Nuruddin Farah (1945) Somali writer

Country

“I do not know what I think until I write it.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

Thinking

“Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Books, Light

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Thinking

“Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

World, History

“But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

“When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

“Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

“If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.”

Don Marquis (1878–1937) American writer

Reading, Personality

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

(, 8 September 1935)”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

Source: The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist

Books

“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”

Andrea Barrett (1954) American novelist and short story writer

Learning, Reading

“What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Girl in Blue

Source: The Girl in Blue (1970)

Books

“I don't think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won't be good at it.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Thinking, Time

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Variant: What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

Way, Thinking