Quotes about writing
377 quotes from 206 people
When I’m writing, I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury1671–1713Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Vol. 1, p. 8; “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950Answers to Nine Questions (September 1896), answers to nine questions submitted by Clarence Rook, who had interviewed him in 1895
Mary Shelley1797–1851Frankenstein (1818), Introduction to the 1831 edition of FrankensteinIn context
William Tecumseh Sherman1820–1891Letter to the City of Atlanta (September 1864)- MSMurasaki Shikibu978–1014The Tale of Genji, trans. Arthur Waley, Ch. 25
Upton Sinclair1878–1968100%: the Story of a Patriot (1920), Section 2
Edith Sitwell1887–1964Describing Virginia Woolf in a letter to Geoffrey Singleton (11 July 1955); John Lehmann and Derek Palmer, eds., Selected Letters (1970)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn1918–2008Nobel lecture (1970)
Susan Sontag1933–2004“The Risk Taker”, profile/interview by Gary Younge, The Guardian (19 January 2002)In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
John Steinbeck1902–1968Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters (1969), entry of 29 January 1951Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Robert Louis Stevenson1850–1894Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896), No. XIVI write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.
Tom Stoppard1937–2025“Tom Stoppard,” profile by Kenneth Tynan, The New Yorker (19 December 1977)
