Writing Quotes

Learning stamps you with it's moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.

~ Eudora Welty

I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck.

~ Joyce Rachelle

They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn't pay by the hour.

~ Joyce Rachelle

Note to myself - It is time for me to start taking my guitar lessons. One of my neighbor's singing and guitar strumming skills are so cool that I can't stop marveling at the music wafting around here.

~ Avijeet Das

[Women] are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don’t, we will be discredited. Sometimes, this is true. But here is a question: Do you want to be a reliable source of literary art (or whatever writing you do), or of prompt emails?

~ Melissa Febos

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist’s life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Thus 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. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

~ Anne Rice

You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.

~ Mitch Albom

...any talent - whether to write songs or to write novels...came with the obligation to use it to the fullest of one's ability, with a fierce commitment barely distinguishable from neurotic obsession. ... In fact...commitment to the point of obsession wasn't merely an obligation but a necessity...

~ Dean Koontz

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures.He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's.He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. He wants to live like these people. He has to make his writing better, to keep going. He has to.He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

~ Jojo Moyes

I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.

~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

Be a good reader first, if you wish to become a good writer.

~ Pawan Mishra

Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.

~ Clarice Lispector

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

~ Kamand Kojouri

First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It’s one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.

~ Bruce Springsteen

At a certain point you have to leave childish things behind, and one of the childish things is a sense that 'Wow, I can draw' or in my case 'Wow, I can read'... You feel you have what's called a talent, but as you become an adult, if you hope to make things, you have to give up the preoccupation with talent otherwise you'll spend your life painting beautiful pictures of fruit bowls that look like fruit bowls.

~ Zadie Smith

The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.

~ Tony Tulathimutte

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

~ Ray Bradbury

It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.

~ Kamand Kojouri

By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).

~ Brenda Ueland

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

~ Kamand Kojouri

The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...

~ Jean Baudrillard

As I said before, I took to miniature painting without a completely whole heart, on the advice of my elders and betters. Generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person's advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one's innermost self. But 'they' advised, and I bowed to the advice; and in this particular instance it was a good thing I did, because the advice turned out to be so resoundingly wrong that it turned me into another direction altogether. If I had gone on working in oils I might very well have been a dedicated but unsuccessful painter to this day.

~ Rosemary Sutcliff

These poems are cupsthat I pour my life into.Here, Drink!

~ Kamand Kojouri

We are all born as storytellers. Our inner voice tells the first story we ever hear.

~ Kamand Kojouri

There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.

~ Tom Pappalardo

Because at nightwhen others are sleeping, I drown myself in poetry.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Silken strings composing the harpsichord of life accommodate a score of emotional tidings. An orchestra of linked heartbeats strumming the melodious prose of our collective intones gives rise to sonnets of melancholy, producing an illimitable libretto stretching from the milky dawn of newborn’s amaranth life to the speckled sunsets of gentle souls whom we cherish.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing, photography...art. It's all about what's in focus.

~ Kelly E. Lindner

We write to go on living, after we have died.

~ Jenim Dibie

Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.

~ Julia Cameron

Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down.

~ Julia Cameron

Say it new or say it straight.

~ Sol Stein

All forms of art are parallel expressions. Writing is not unlike painting or other artistic endeavors. Each artistic endeavor is an expression of the mystery of the world. The job of the artist is to deepen that mystery, express reverence for the mystery of life, and explore the enigmatic aspects of human nature.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.[from the introduction]

~ Dorothy Bussy

Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana