Writing Quotes · Page 248

Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.

— Iris Chang

“a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution”

— Jean Paul Sartre

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.

— Gertrude Stein

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

— Anonymous

I love carrying feelings, it brings out the best in my writings !!

— Glen Rambharack

Truth maybe stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer.

— Frederic Raphael

Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.

— Etgar Keret

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

— Joyce Rachelle

I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write…

— Steve Earle

All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but…

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to…

— Mark Mothersbaugh

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I can't be interesting, controversial, and the writer I'd like to be if I need everybody to like me and think I'm…

— Marti Noxon

I write every moment that is humanly possible. I write every day and every night. The only discipline I lack is the…

— Barbara Kingsolver

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. A writer who has to go into the…

— Charles Bukowski

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who…

— Alice Mattison

“Sometimes, what people choose to write down on paper is more important than what they say." Caleb didn't know what Sarah meant.…

— Patricia MacLachlan

“Good storytelling creates a sense of anticipation in the reader’s or viewer’s mind, and the experience is a pleasurable one for the…

— Nick Morgan

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can…

— Adrienne Rich

“... Because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or…

— Bret Easton Ellis

All these people helped make this book possible. But let me make one thing clear: If there are any errors or omissions…

— Dave Barry

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's…

— Margaret Atwood

“the only one with an ear for prose who could follow his arguments about why Flannery O’Conner and Grace Paley were bolder,…

— Paul Auster

“When my head is in the typewriter the last thing on my mind is some imaginary reader. I don’t have an audience;…

— Don DeLillo

I notice inspiration when it comes by. I don't sit down at my desk and try to write.

— Gary Panter

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

— Raymond Carver

Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.

— Isabel Allende

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

— Joseph Brodsky

Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate, That few, but such as cannot write, translate.

— John Denham

See how God writes history. No technical knowledge is required; only a calm day and a calm mind.

— John Muir

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

— Andre Aciman

I saw an interview with Jay-Z where he said he didn't write down any of his lyrics, so I tried that.

— Travis Morrison

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

— John Edgar Wideman

I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened.

— Hisham Matar

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

— Gene Wolfe

We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.

— Larry Kramer

That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.

— Oscar Wilde

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

— C. S. Lewis

When writing is good, everything is symbolic, but symbolic writing is seldom good.

— Wright Morris

“Words to a writer is like notes to a musician, both know when they are off key.”

— June Davidson