T Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with T. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.”
“To write drama is to leave a can of Coke by the side of the road. Then, sit on that can of Coke. Where's the can of Coke now?”
“To write fiction, one needs a whole series of inspirations about people in an actual environment, and then a whole lot of work on the basis of those inspirations.”
Source: Moksha: Aldous Huxley's Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience
“To write for a living, according to Mr. Whipple, is coquetting with starvation.”
“To write for children at all is an act of faith.”
“To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.”
“To write good poems is the secret of brevity.”
“To write good SF today...you must push further and harder, reach deeper into your own mind until you break through into the strange and terrible country wherein live your own dreams.”
“To write has to be related to a drive inside.”
“To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.”
“To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.”
Source: Mimesis
“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.”
“To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”
“To write honestly and with conviction anything about the migration of birds, one should oneself have migrated. Somehow or other we should dehumanize ourselves, feel the feel of feathers on our body and wind in our wings, and finally know what it is to leave abundance and safety and daylight and yield to a compelling instinct, age-old, seeming at the time quite devoid of reason and object.”
Source: A Naturalist's Life of New York
“To write is a humiliation.”
Source: The Carnal Myth: A Search Into Classical Sensuality
“To write is human, to receive a letter: Divine!”
“To write is human, to edit is divine.”
Source: On writing: a memoir of the craft
“To write is not just seeing the world through a kaleidoscope of possibilities, but a means to shift the tides of color that exist within it.”
“To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.”
Source: Carnets: 1935-1942
“To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.”
Source: Wanderlust: A History of Walking
“To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.”
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“To write is to inform against others.”
“To write is to lose myself, yes, but everyone loses himself, because everything gets lost. I, however, lose myself without any joy - not like the river flowing into the sea for which it was secretly born, but like the puddle left on the beach by the high tide, its stranded water never returning to the ocean but merely sinking into the sand.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.”
Source: The Space of Literature
“To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.”
“To write is to plant seeds in the minds of strangers. Some bloom long after you’re gone.”
“To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god which guides it - and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that bloomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.”
“To write is to re-create something as you'd like it to be.”
Source: Nora Goes Off Script
“To write is to remember out loud. Sometimes for the world. Sometimes just so the silence knows it was heard.”
“To write is to reveal oneself.
When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.
I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.”
“To write is to right things. A path will emerge.”
“To write is to think, and to write well is to think well.”
“To write is to unearth all that you have carefully enfolded inside...to write is to bring into light the buried dreams and desires you once had...of a life you once imagined....to write is to collect the left overs and build them into a house of words...”
“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”
“To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.”
“To write is, indeed, no unpleasing employment, when one sentiment readily produces another, and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the first summons; but such happiness, the greatest genius does not always obtain; and common writers know it only to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.”
Source: The Works of Samuel Johnson: The Adventurer and Idler
“To write it down was to put the finishing touch on any event, see what it was, what it meant, what it stood for. To put anything into words was like pouring melted wax on top of cold glasses of jelly, to harden there and preserve and keep what was underneath like new.”
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.”
Source: The Great Gatsby
“To write more from memory and to be more creative - I think - because I am still writing about Los Angeles but I can't walk out my door and immediately drive to places I am writing about. So I think it has been a very good change for me after 11 books to start writing this way.”
“To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it.”
Source: The Spanish Drama. Lope de Vega and Calderon
“To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.”
“To write of the self is to write in the shape of a wound that never stops opening.”
Source: Under the Sign of the Labyrinth
“To write one book may be regarded as a misfortune, to write two just looks like recklessness.”
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.”
“To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence.”
Source: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945
“To write or read on the precipice feels right in this moment in particular, as if it is coming into a new fullness, a wholeness which was not possibly entirely in the complacency of our living before, the city whose obverse was not at Necropolis yet. This is the moment when the skin of the fig gives into the needle of the wasp’s thorax, when the wasp breaks into the dark.”
Source: We the Parasites
“To write or speak is to communicate. To communicate is to share meanings, make them ‘common’ to all participants in the discourse. (The etymological root of communication means ‘common.’)”
Source: The Language War
“To write past events in the present tense adds immediacy to your prose. ~Yvonne Blackwood”
Source: Nosey Charlie Chokes On a Wiener! (The Adventures of Nosey Charlie)