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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.
Alan Mooreborn 1953“Down Among the Dead Men”, Swamp Thing Annual #2, 1985
Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.
Alan Mooreborn 1953“The Mustard magazine interview” (January 2005)
- Life & Death
A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.
Marianne Moore1887–1972Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963)
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Toni Morrison1931–2019“Black Matters” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!
Vladimir Nabokov1899–1977Lolita (1955)
I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
Vladimir Nabokov1899–1977Strong Opinions (1973), p. 45
- Knowledge
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.
Vladimir Nabokov1899–1977Strong Opinions (1973), Foreword
- Genius
- Talking
Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than an hundred thousand bayonets.
Napoleon1769–1821Appears to be fabricated as it is not known from surviving print before 19 March 1845 when it appeared in Mississippi Democrat in an article titled ‘The Press’ and in The North-Carolina Standard on its own as a column filler. On April 17, 1845 a long
- Journalism
To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.
Napoleon1769–1821
I’m going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I’m going to write the songs that people can’t write for themselves.
Stevie Nicksborn 1948Kia Makarechi, “Stevie Nicks On Fleetwood Mac’s Reunion Tour, Rihanna, Kanye West & Her Early Years In Music”, Huffington Post, 3 December 2012
- Music
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
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)
In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak: but for that, you need long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks: and those to whom they are spoken, big and tall.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Part I, Chapter 7
- Quotations
You ask me why I do not write something… I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
Florence Nightingale1820–1910Letter to a friend, quoted in The Life of Florence Nightingale (1913) by Edward Tyas Cook, p. 94