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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  • DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.

    Frank Miller

    We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

    Franz Kafka

    Fiction should be a place of lollipops and escape. Real life is depressing enough--I, for one, don't want to read about make believe misery, too.

    Nicole Christie

    I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

    Octavia E. Butler

    Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

    Oscar Wilde

    I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

    P.G. Wodehouse

    She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

    P.G. Wodehouse

    A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

    Franz Kafka

    Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

    Franz Kafka

    I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

    Franz Kafka

    This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

    Franz Kafka

    I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.

    Pablo Neruda

    Poems are never finished - just abandoned

    Paul Valéry

    I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

    Franz Kafka

    Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

    Franz Kafka

    A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

    Pearl S. Buck

    A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

    Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

    Philip José Farmer

    After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

    Philip Pullman

    All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

    Garrison Keillor

    Never put off writing until you are better at it.

    Gary Henderson

    If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.

    George Gordon Byron

    Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

    George Orwell

    A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

    Phyllis A. Whitney

    If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.

    R.A. Salvatore

    There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

    Ralph Waldo Emerson

    Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

    Ray Bradbury

    You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

    Ray Bradbury

    If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

    George Orwell

    A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

    George Orwell

    Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

    George R.R. Martin

    Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

    Gilles Deleuze

    Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

    Gloria Steinem

    A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

    Graham Greene

    A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

    Richard Bach

    A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

    Roald Dahl

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