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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Twilight of the Idols (1889)
Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Part I, Chapter 7
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.
Robert A. Heinlein1907–1988The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 33)
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
Arthur Miller1915–2005Harper’s (August 1958)
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann1875–1955Essays of Three Decades (1942)
All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.
Thomas Aquinas1225–1274Processus canonizationis S. Thomae, Neapoli, LXXIX
- Faith
Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (August 1881), in Salomé’s biography of Nietzsche, tr. Siegfried Mandel (1988)
The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more.
Isabel Allendeborn 1942In Interviews with Latin American Writers (1989)
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
MOMary Oliver1935–2019Winter Hours (1999), “Sand Dabs, Six”
That writer does the most, who gives his reader the most knowledge, and takes from him the least time.
CCCharles Caleb Colton1777–1832Preface
- Knowledge
Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain1835–1910Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924), Vol. I, p. 2
I think the author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Benjamin Disraeli1804–1881Speech at a banquet given by the city of Glasgow on his installation as Lord Rector of Glasgow University (19 November 1873), cited in Wit and Wisdom of Benjamin Disraeli (1881), p. 16
Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.
Rudyard Kipling1865–1936“Fiction”, speech to the Royal Society of Literature, June 1926; published in Writings on Writing: Rudyard Kipling (1996), ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis, p. 80
- Truth & Lies
An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
E. B. White1899–1985Letter to Shirley Wiley (30 March 1954), in The Letters of E. B. White (1989), p. 391
And I have written three books on the soul,
Proving absurd all written hitherto,
And putting us to ignorance again.
Robert Browning1812–1889Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Cleon.
- Knowledge