100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

340 Quotes

You're never really writing something as much as you're rewriting it. The first draft is just the beginning of the process, and everything that comes after is a response to what came before. -Margaret Atwood

Here are some Writing Quotes some of the World’s most successful writers and authors like Hemingway,

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  • My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

    Abigail Adams

    The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

    Agatha Christie

    There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.

    Agatha Christie

    To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

    Akira Kurosawa

    The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

    Alan Dean Foster

    The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

    Albert Camus

    We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

    Allen Ginsberg

    A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

    Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

    Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

    André Gide

    Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

    Aldous Huxley

    No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

    Alexander Trocchi

    I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

    Alexandre Dumas

    What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

    Alfred Hitchcock

    Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

    Alice Walker

    Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

    Anne Carson

    I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

    Anne Frank

    Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

    Anton Chekhov

    Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

    Allen Ginsberg

    This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

    Anaïs Nin

    We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

    Anaïs Nin

    The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

    Anaïs Nin

    If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

    Anaïs Nin

    I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

    Anaïs Nin

    The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

    Arthur Miller

    True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

    Arthur Rimbaud

    One should use common words to say uncommon things

    Arthur Schopenhauer

    I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

    Anaïs Nin

    Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

    Ann Patchett

    Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

    Anne Lamott

    Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

    Anne Lamott

    You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

    Annie Proulx

    A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

    Baltasar Gracián

    I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

    C.S. Lewis

    Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

    C.S. Lewis

    We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

    Anthony Burgess

    A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

    Anthony Trollope

    There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.

    Beatrix Potter

    The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

    Benjamin Disraeli

    Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

    Besa Kosova

    A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

    Caroline Gordon

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