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Quotes about writing

377 quotes from 206 people

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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
A novel is an impression, not an argument
Thomas Hardy1840–1928Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Author’s Preface to the Fifth and Later EditionsIn context
Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.
Voltaire1694–1778Candide (1759), Chapter XXVIn context
- Fame
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,⁠—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Emily Dickinson1830–1886This is my letter to the World (1890)In context
- Nature
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
John Keats1795–1821When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be (1818)In context
- Fear
- Life & Death
A traveller’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad, as well as good, example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.
Jonathan Swift1667–1745Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms, Chapter XIIIn context
- Wisdom
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson1809–1892In Memoriam A.H.H. (1849), Canto VIn context
- Emotion
Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talk that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.
E. M. Forster1879–1970A Passage to India (1924), Part II: Caves, Chapter XIVIn context
- Life & Death
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.
Jane Austen1775–1817Northanger Abbey (1817), Chapter 1In context
John is a physician, and perhaps⁠—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)⁠—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman1860–1935The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)In context
- Health
Violent obsessions sometimes lay hold of a man: he may, for instance, think day and night of nothing but the moon. I have such a moon. Day and night I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write!
Anton Chekhov1860–1904The Seagull (1896), Act II, spoken by TrigorinIn context
To my dying day I shall hear people say: “Clever and pretty; clever and pretty,” and nothing more; and when I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: “Here lies Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff.”
Anton Chekhov1860–1904The Seagull (1896), Act II, spoken by TrigorinIn context
- Fame
The conviction is gradually forcing itself upon me that good literature is not a question of forms new or old, but of ideas that must pour freely from the author’s heart, without his bothering his head about any forms whatsoever.
Anton Chekhov1860–1904The Seagull (1896), Act IV, spoken by TreplieffIn context
No story lives unless someone wants to listen.
The stories we love best do live in us forever. So, whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.
J. K. Rowlingborn 1965Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 London Premiere (July 2011)
- Reading
If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.
Stanley Kubrick1928–1999“The Making of Kubrick’s 2001” (1970), edited by Jerome Agel, pg 11. Quoted in Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s and Video Viewer’s Companion (1988), p. 403.
- Movies