W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.”
Source: Look Again
“writing had to take the form of journalism. Not for me the Shangri-la of fiction. The rewards, if any, would have been too little and too late, the bailiffs were at the door. ... Two large bailiffs, they were, who visited frequently and smiled like grand pianos, the only really reliable men in my life. They told me what they were going to do and if they did it, woe was me.”
“Writing has always allowed me to escape. I was a very lonely child. Because I was very socially awkward, I would always have trouble making friends. And so reading and writing allowed me to have friends and to have an active imaginary life that really sort of kept me sane.”
“Writing has always been a sanctuary or a refuge for me, any time I'm stressed or anxious or worried I find that a couple of hours expressing myself by writing always seems to have a calming effect on me.”
“Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.”
Source: There Was a Country: A Memoir
“Writing has always been my go-to form of expression. Whenever I was going through something as a kid, I would write it down and I would turn it into a poem.”
“Writing has always been the primary way I make sense of the world.”
“Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.”
“Writing has always had a tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.”
“Writing has become more than just a profession, and hobby…it has become a way to express my feelings and pour my entire soul into the pages of my books. Thank God for the little things in life that makes us feel infinite and tranquil…the little things that make way for us to escape reality and enter new worlds that we create. -Nina Jean Slack”
“Writing has become my great joy - I simply love it.”
“Writing has been a compelling force in my life, though I’ve never been able to pinpoint exactly why.”
“Writing has been a way of explaining to myself the things I do not understand.”
“Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality – a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the streets – but has become ''the possession,'’ a period of time, circumscribed and completed.”
Source: The Possession
“Writing has been an important exercise to clarify what I believe, what I see, what I care about, what my deepest values are. The process of converting a jumble of thoughts into coherent sentences makes you ask tougher questions.”
“Writing has been challenging at times but that's where all the growth is. I know I'm in the right place if it's difficult. Something a British writer said to me once was: "If the project doesn't make him wobble, he doesn't take it." You have to be uncomfortable to grow.”
“Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.”
Source: Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
“Writing has enriched my life in ways I never imaged.”
“Writing has freed me from the despair of living.”
“Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.”
Source: Conversations with Edward Albee
“Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.”
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”
“Writing has made me a better actor. Acting has made me a better writer. So why wouldn't directing make me a better actor and writer?”
“Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.”
Source: Shrovetide in old New Orleans
“Writing has made me rich-not in money but in a couple hundred characters out there, whose pursuits and anguish and triumphs I've shared. I am unspeakably grateful at the life I have come to lead.”
“Writing has never been a driving force within me.”
“Writing has never been that simple for me.”
“Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.”
“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”
“Writing has nothing to do with pretty manners, and less to do with sportsmanship or restraint [...]
Every writer begins as a subversive, if in nothing more than the antisocial means by which he earns his keep. Finally, every fantasist who cannibalizes himself knows that misfortune is his friend, that grief feeds and sharpens his fancy, that hatred is as sufficient a spur to creation as love (and a world more common) and that without an instinct for lunacy he will come to nothing.”
“Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.”
“Writing has often been accompanied by terror, silences, and then wild bursts of private laughter that suddenly make all the dread seem worthwhile.”
Source: Fear of Fifty
“Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.”
“Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.”
Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Writing has such a power for expressionEven when you can’t talk with no one else in the whole world you can talk to your paper. Your feelings whether good, bad or indifferent. We call it despojo in Spanish, which means to be able to get rid of all this agony, weight inside of you. It brings clarity.”
“Writing has taught me that the frontier isn’t always a place. Sometimes it’s a season of your life. The space between who you were and who you might still become.”
“Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.”
“Writing has to have a great deal of certainty and self-assurance, but it's not arrogant.”
“Writing has to support itself.”
“Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.”
“Writing helped me understand what I was thinking about.”
“Writing helped to have jobs that involved running around, pushing things like dish carts and wheelbarrows. It would be hard to sit at a desk all day, and then come to sit at another desk. Also, it helps to abandon hope. If I sit at my computer, determined to write a New Yorker story I won't get beyond the first sentence. It's better to put no pressure on it. What would happen if I followed the previous sentence with this one, I'll think. If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you're writing humor.”
“Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to.”
“Writing helps me process things that are happening to me.”
“Writing helps us heal in certain way, but it doesn't make the experience of thinking about writing that occasion any less painful. When you revisit trauma, you don't know what's going to be triggering for you because you don't know how it's connected in your mind. So in the same way when we write something, it doesn't completely resolve the experience for us. It can feel therapeutic, but that's not the reason why I do it. I do it to ask a question, or just to find meaning.”
“Writing here, I realise how much I must learn and how hard it will be to regain my moral integrity. It's not hard to begin. I think of every conscious addition that goes into pulling something back.”
“Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.”
“Writing history is a method of getting rid of the past.”
Source: Criticisms, reflections, and maxims of Goethe: Tr., with an introduction
“Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.”
“Writing history is slippery, there is little Truth with an upper case T, but a lot of lower-case “truths” that are filtered through the perceptions of others.”
Source: "Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion