Quotessence
Home / Topics / Writing Quotes

Writing Quotes

Browse 36579 quotes about Writing.

Related topics

IfsThinkingPeopleBookKnowsWaySongWantStoriesTryingWorldFeelsNovelKindI CanFirstsYearsWellsCharacterIdeasNeedsMenShouldSometimesReadingWrittenDifferentLongLittlesGivingMeanMindArtFictionWantedReaderPlayPersonsHardImportantTwoStillsDoneRealLiteratureStuffEnoughEndsBelieveProcessSaidMayHas BeensMy OwnLooksAbleDoeFeelingsSeemsPagesMadeMightUseHappensChildrenLanguageMatterReasonPaperFilmWould BeShowsCreativeWholeHeartMomentsHelpingLettersJobsHumansRememberFormInterestingArtistTogetherUsedKidsNextPoetSongwritingPiecesThreeFunDifficultSchoolSelfHandsVoiceHoursLinesmore

Writing Quotes

“But once an original book has been written - and no more than one or two appear in a century - men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be achieved by apes, who are essentially imitators, provided, of course, that they are able to make use of language.”

MenShouldWritingHas BeensTwoBookDifferentUseAbleCoursesLanguageWrittenCenturyLettersOriginalsTitlesThemeCopiesApesImitatorUse Of Language
Book:Planet of the Apes
Create image

“Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.”

WritingMadeLanguageSoundSleepLevelsDogTasteSkillsToolsSakeTongueSurfaceSignificantFactorsObsessedPassagesSurgeonsArcticBaroqueRacersScalpels
Book:The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
Create image

“I am committed to writing appropriate books for the middle grades. This means no bad language, no gratuitous or explicit violence, and no sexual content beyond what you might find in a PG-rated movie – expressions of who likes whom, holding hands, and perhaps the occasional kiss. The idea that we should treat sexual orientation itself as an adults-only topic, however, is absurd. Non-heterosexual children exist. To pretend they do not, to fail to recognize that they have needs for support and validation like any child, would be bad teaching, bad writing, and bad citizenship.”

NeedsShouldWritingMeanChildrenBookIdeasHandsMightWould BeLanguageSupportViolenceFailingTeachingMiddleExpressionKissingAdultsTreatsCommittedLikesAbsurdGradesAppropriateCitizenshipTopicsOccasionalOrientationValidationExplicitHolding HandsBad WritingBad Language
Author:Rick Riordan
Create image

“Every sentence has its drumbeat. rhythm is one of the most powerful dimensions of language: it separates tribes, united families, soothes children, and shocks us into new awarenesses. Every good writer, marching to his or her own drumbeat, marks out a vibrational field as home territory. The cadences of our sentences carry echos of ancestry and influence as surely as the double helix that orchstrates the life of the body.”

WritingChildrenHomeBodyLanguageUnitedPowerfulInfluenceAwarenessFieldsMarkVery GoodSentencesRhythmDimensionsShockMost PowerfulSongwritingTerritoryTribesAncestryGood WritersCadenceUnited Family
Author:Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
Create image

“The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.”

WantWritingYearsHas BeensLanguageNationsSecretIgnoranceWallBiggerConsumptionConsumerismCharmingCheerfulUglinessOverconsumptionIlliterateVetsInfuriatingBlithe
Book:Small Wonder
Create image

“I have this feeling of wending my way or plundering through a mysterious jungle of possibilities when I am writing. This jungle has not been explored by previous writers. It never will be explored. It's endlessly varying as we progress through the experience of time. These words that occur to me come out of my relation to the language which is developing even as I am using it.”

WayWritingFeelingsLanguageProgressPossibilityRelationMysteriousMy WayDevelopingJungle
Author:William Stafford
Create image

“All education is despotism. It is perhaps impossible for the young to be conducted without introducing in many cases the tyranny implicit in obedience. Go there; do that; read; write; rise; lie down - will perhaps forever be the language addressed to youth by age.”

WritingAgeYoungLyingLanguageCasesForeverImpossibleYouthTyrannyObedienceIntroducingDespotismImplicit
Book:The enquirer. Reflections on education, manners, and literature. In a series of essays
Create image

“Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced.”

ThinkingWayGivingFeelsWritingTryingMindHeartHas BeensIdeasRealityAbleLanguageTiesReceivingDivorcedContradictory
Author:Eduardo Galeano
Create image

“The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.”

WorldWritingEyeTodayLanguageFictionResponsibilityVisionPovertyRolesAwarenessEarsIncreaseTongueSensesDeprivedPoorestCripples
Author:Anais Nin
Create image

“The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.”

ShouldWritingLanguageSocialSpacePracticeSubjectsPositionJudgingMastersTheoryActivitySafeResearchDiscourseAnalysts
Author:Roland Barthes
Create image