Writing Quotes

That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.

~ Hélène Cixous

Writing is a blurred mirror. Sometimes we work harder to see how we are reflected, but often we avert our gaze from the shadowy image.

~ Kristen Twardowski

Even writing about rainbows makes me smile.

~ Anthony T. Hincks

When I write, my soul sings.

~ Melissa Marsh

It's okay to be crazy as long as you keep writing and are happy.

~ Lori Lesko

I am content when writing short stories.

~ Sarah Mazucci

Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I’ll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name, perhaps because I’m a regular. Anyways got my shit, left…barely covering the tax. Took the long way home; to get away from that haunting typewriter. Sat down at some park bench, as I started to open my poison; A memory rushed into me. A empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the Christmas tree. I thought my dad would want another drink, so started to pour my bottle into the dirt & cried.

~ Brandon Villasenor

Cuz even a gangsta rapper can find redemptionFor the sins committed before revelation.

~ Carlos Salinas

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a place I never had to go, for this earth was greater than any paradise.

~ Daniel J. Rice

I can taste fear, and lies, on a man's skin, Cavrax. The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric's neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. You're lying to me.

~ C.n. Faust

Traveled so far, and not yet have they come across anything of interest, he mused, except, of course, for that nest of goblins I managed to stir up. Indeed, his brother had always been a valiant fool; why not give him some excitement?He always did possess a love for a good fight, and who am I to deny him?The glass sphere, responding to his thoughts, zoomed in on the mountain nearby where Shrukian camped, and by putting both his hands on the sphere's sides and closing his eyes, Pharun could all but smell the power that radiated from its depths. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, and it awake all sorts of things inside of him. The power tasted of death and ash, and it was scalding hot, pouring down his throat like blood of the freshly dead. He did not need further searching to know what kind of power he was sampling.He smiled to himself, and it came out a satisfied smirk.

~ C.n. Faust

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

For me, writing is just as much a choice as breathing. I can quit anytime I want, but not starting again would prove fatal.

~ Pamela Morris

To reach the pinnacle of your writings potential, productivity becomes obsolete.

~ Marston James

Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.

~ Sara Sheridan

If a good system of agriculture, unrivaled manufacturing skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to either convenience or luxury, schools established in every village for teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, the general practice of hospitality and charity amongst each other, and above all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect, and delicacy, are among the signs which denote a civilized people – then the Hindus are not inferior to the nations of Europe, and if civilization is to become an article of trade between England and India, I am convinced that England will gain by the import cargo.

~ Thomas Munro

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. Terrified of squandering our existence, we each seek to break out from our muteness and strike an accord with our brothers and sisters whom share our inherent desire to reach a global consilience.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

To speak much is one thing, to speak to the point another!

~ Sophocles

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.

~ Philip Zaleski

Clarity of thought is a must for brevity in speech.

~ Somali K Chakrabarti

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

~ N.t. Wright

Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language.

~ David Brooks

He was a stylist, not a thinker. He spent time trying to say things in as complicated a way as possible.

~ Peter Heather

I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.

~ C.s. Lewis

One journalist complemented another that his article on a dispute, had made both sides see themselves as they are.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

There’s a much different message received, when the signs written in the flesh were not in your hand writing.

~ Dixie Waters

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

~ Robert Lane Greene

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

~ Pat Conroy

I've found myself moved by letters and diaries in archives as well as trashy, summer blockbusters. It's possible to make a connection with any kind of writing - as long as the writing is good.

~ Sara Sheridan

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

~ John C. Bean

Bill Bryson's is a synthesizing intellect, capable of translating myriad data into a digestible narrative – rare currency in an increasingly atomized society.

~ Allen Guy Wilcox

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

~ Carl Sagan

In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and it’s true in the parlor, and it’s true in made-up towns and New York. Two humans face one another, words come out of one, words go into the other mind through the ears and eyes of the listener. It’s a story. It’s simple. The gap is the thing. Make sure you build the bridge.

~ Patrick Somerville

And my advice to anyone who wants to be a writer? Read a lot, listen to people’s conversations, be observant about the details of your world, and especially about human behaviour and interaction, and persist in your writing, being single-minded to the point of obsession…never give up, always believe in yourself despite all evidence to the contrary, and hold out for what you first dreamed of.

~ Sc Skillman

Find the good, and praise it.

~ Alex Haley

When you enter the woods of a fairy tale and it is night, the trees tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts, the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are insurmountable - pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise. From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension. You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling windows and empty refrigerator - to your meager livelihood, which demands, inevitably, that you write about it.

~ Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.

~ Fish

We all have the time we need to tell our stories.

~ Kim Zarins

When I read the ghastly lines of tragedy darkly penned into my life, I turn and notice that the pen in my hand is wet.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

She leans into the memory. She stares. She concentrates. What IS it that's she's looking for, trying to get straight at last?

~ Vivian Gornick