Writing Quotes

When I’m passionate about something I strive for excellence, judging whether or not I achieved it is up to the audience.

~ Kevin Focke

In my opinion, works of art should be viewed as gifts; something precious given from a point of empathy, where personal enrichment is vastly superior to the value of the gift, and the giver begs for nothing but for the gift to shine on its own.

~ Kevin Focke

Maybe stories choose how they are told and who tells them.

~ Kamand Kojouri

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

~ Andrew Solomon

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.

~ Virginia Woolf

Writing is probably the only form of art, through which you can express, which you would otherwise wouldn't dare to say in person....

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.

~ Marie Luise Knott

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this--letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write. Books aren't just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable--but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one's soul to grow.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Feedback doesn’t tell you about yourself. It tells you about the person giving the feedback. In other words, if someone says your work is gorgeous, that just tells you about *their* taste. If you put out a new product and it doesn’t sell at all, that tells you something about what your audience does and doesn’t want. When we look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it, we tend to get really curious about the feedback, rather than dejected or defensive.

~ Tara Mohr

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down Desolation Row. I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

~ Patti Smith

Art is everywhere.

~ A.d. Posey

All art is a form of vulnerability because at least part of the artist goes into the piece.

~ A.d. Posey

Art is life.

~ A.d. Posey

Every work of art tells a story.

~ A.d. Posey

Style jazzes up your canvas.

~ A.d. Posey

Film is the ultimate canvas, the elixir of art, and the magic of life.

~ A.d. Posey

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

~ Pablo Picasso

if you have to wait for it to roar out ofyou,then wait patiently.if it never does roar out of you,do something else.

~ Charles Bukowski

unless it comes out ofyour soul like a rocket,unless being still woulddrive you to madness orsuicide or murder,don’t do it.unless the sun inside you isburning your gut,don’t do it.when it is truly time,and if you have been chosen,it will do it byitself and it will keep on doing ituntil you die or it dies in you.there is no other way.and there never was.

~ Charles Bukowski

The extent of creativity to which I admire in an individual is his ability to be richly creative while still, in a way, telling the truth. It is the fool who creates only his own lies, and the bore who simply repeats what he is told.

~ Criss Jami

The best thing about Art is that the people who create it live forever.

~ Jonathan Heatt

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

~ Lawrence Wright

...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

~ Janet Frame

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.

~ Iris Murdoch

Literacy is a fundamental life skill, one that serves as a portal to knowledge and a lifetime of opportunity.

~ Story Shares

Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.

~ Alice W. Flaherty

Remember, when we're lost in a story, we're not passively reading about something that's happening to someone else.

~ Lisa Cron

She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale. So she read instead, and admired those who could.

~ Nora Roberts

Story of civilization starts with reading, and story of creativity starts with writing

~ Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won't lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you'll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.

~ Karl Ove Knausgã¥Rd

If we can't have world peace, I'll settle for a quiet room.

~ Joyce Rachelle

You're never as good a writer as you think you are, and you're never as bad. Just keep reading and writing, writing, writing.

~ Don Roff

It's not a silly pursuit to read beyond what's handed to you, to seek out new voices and leap over the usual books everyone's already talking about and see what you can find on your own.Making definitive choices about what we spend our time on as readers can make a statement, a difference. We can lift other writers up, give space and attention to more voices than the ones that already have all the space and attention.There is power in what we choose to consume as readers, and there is power in what we choose to amplify, celebrate, and share.

~ Nova Ren Suma

I look upon fine phrases as a lover. - John Keats

~ Beatrice K. Otto

Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It wasn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the poem or the story itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don;t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

~ Eudora Welty

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.

~ Yann Martel

The animated cartoon has a lot to teach the writer, above all how to define characters and objects with a few strokes.

~ Peter Mendelsund