W Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with W. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.”
“Writing of only one small part of the broader problem, namely the single-minded pursuit of individualistic 'rights,' [Don] Feder is not wrong to conclude:
Absent a delicate balance--rights and duties, freedom and order--the social fabric begins to unravel. The rights explosion of the past three decades has taken us on a rapid descent to a culture without civility, decency, or even that degree of discipline necessary to maintain an advanced industrial civilization. Our cities are cesspools, our urban schools terrorist training camps, our legislatures brothels where rights are sold to the highest electoral bidder.”
Source: The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism
“Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”
Source: Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing
“Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.”
“Writing on a computer feels like a recipe for writer's block. I can type so fast that I run out of thoughts, and then I sit there and look at the words on the screen, and move them around, and never get anywhere. Whereas in a notebook I just keep plodding along, slowly, accumulating sentences, sometimes even surprising myself.”
“Writing on a contract for a major studio you get the very best.”
“Writing on dark themes is not as easy as one might think; you have to live the worst and the most terrifying nightmares, again and again, till they consume you entirely and become an inseparable part of you that you start dreading.”
“Writing on the blog, you want to get attention and make strong claims. In academic work, that often doesn't pay, so sometimes it's a little bit difficult going back and forth to navigate these differences.”
“Writing on the road is a passion of mine.”
“Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing.”
“Writing on the wall: Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth.”
“Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.”
“Writing only leads to more writing.”
“Writing only to please myself is not self-defeating. Comparable to an apple tree that expends its entire effort attempting to grow and claims no direct interest in the apples that fall from its branches, I hold no interest in harvesting any fruit from the actual work. Akin to the apple tree, I too desire to expand my depth and breadth, by seeking self-actualization and self-realization, using the mentally productive act of writing to branch out from a timbered core. Writing allows me to bud new branches while slithering about at almost an undetectable pace. Reading and writing profoundly influence how a person perceives the ground and the skyline that frames human life.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Writing or making anything-a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake-has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.”
“Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.”
“Writing organizes and clarifies our thoughts. Writing is how we think our way into a subject and make it our own. Writing enables us to find out what we know-and what we don't know-about whatever we're trying to learn.”
“Writing original songs is much, much harder (I think) because you only have yourself to conjure up EVERY single moment a listener is going to hear. It's a craft that goes directly from your brain to their ears. You can never be sure that what you're writing is gonna be good enough to keep a listener engaged and truly experience something. It's a shot in the dark.”
“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”
Source: Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
“Writing our eulogy can be a wake-up call to prioritize what truly matters.”
Source: Snackable Existentialism: Small Portions, Big Ideas
“Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.”
“Writing Pathway to Joy and Success has been more than a creative endeavour; it has been a healing journey of reflection, courage, and rediscovery. Every word was born from lived experience — from moments of joy, heartbreak, hope, and the countless in-betweens that shape who we become.
I am deeply grateful to the people who walked beside me — both in silence and in support.”
Source: Pathway to Joy and Success: A journey of the heart... where joy awakens, and success finds its soul.
“Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.”
“Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.”
Source: Dead Toad Scrolls
“Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.”
“Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.”
Source: Everyday Use
“Writing poems is the best revenge.”
“Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Source: Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader
“Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.”
Source: The Prince of Tides: A Novel
“Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.”
“Writing poetry is a pleasure,...a pleasure out of hell”
“Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.”
“Writing poetry is a state of free float.”
Source: Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood
“Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!”
“Writing poetry is like having sex with the universe and the language is just a condom.”
“Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.”
“Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.”
“Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.”
Source: Airing Dirty Laundry
“Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.”
“Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn’t know what else to be.”
“Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.”
Source: Windows that open inward: images of Chile
“Writing pornography is deadly, nothing duller. I mean a toll-taker has a more exciting life than a pornographer.”
“Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.”
Source: Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
“Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free-floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader's full attention.”
“Writing quotes is physiotherapy for the brain.”
“Writing quotes often inspires research.”
“Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.”
“Writing really is a difficult craft and there are many parts to master.”
“Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly if belatedly that conservatives disdain for liberal intellectuals had slipped into disdain for the educated class as a whole, and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole.”
“Writing relies on very few things, my friend. All you need to write is your brain, a way to convey the story into existence (pen, computer, whatever), and a place in which to do it (office, kitchen table, lunar brothel).”