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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
Herman Melville1819–1891Moby-Dick (1851), Chapter CIVIn context
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
James A. Michener1907–1997
I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.
James A. Michener1907–1997
I think the crucial thing in the writing career is to find what you want to do and how you fit in. What somebody else does is of no concern whatever except as an interesting variation.
James A. Michener1907–1997
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
James A. Michener1907–1997
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
Arthur Miller1915–2005Harper’s (August 1958)
I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity.
Arthur Miller1915–2005Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
Arthur Miller1915–2005National Observer (January 20, 1964)
- Wisdom
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller1891–1980Henry Miller on Writing (1964), p. 22
Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern.
Henry Miller1891–1980“Reflections on Writing”, in The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Because my spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
A. A. Milne1882–1956Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Chapter VIIn context
- Comedy
He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.
John Milton1608–1674Apology for Smectymnuus (1642)
- Poetry
Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.
Yukio Mishima1925–1970Sun and Steel (1968), p. 9.
All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.
Molière1622–1673Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), Act II, sc. iv
- Comedy
Amongst so many borrowed things, I am glad if I can steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service.
Michel de Montaigne1533–1592Essays, Book III, Ch. 12, Of Physiognomy