Writing quotes
Welcome to our collection of quotes on the topic of Writing. Writing is a powerful form of self-expression that has the ability to captivate, inspire, and connect people from all walks of life. Whether you are a seasoned author, a budding writer, or simply someone who appreciates the beauty of words, you'll find something to resonate with in this collection.
Writing allows us to delve into the depths of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences, transforming them into a tangible and relatable form. It is a tool that transcends time and space, offering us glimpses into different cultures, perspectives, and ideas. From the works of literary giants to the musings of everyday individuals, writing has the power to shape our understanding of the world.
Within this compilation, you'll find a wealth of wisdom, insight, and inspiration from renowned authors, poets, journalists, and more who have shared their thoughts on the art of writing. Explore the quotes that celebrate the beauty of language, the struggle of finding the right words, the thrill of crafting a story, and the catharsis that comes with expressing oneself through writing.
So, whether you're seeking motivation to pen your own masterpiece or simply in need of some words to ponder, we invite you to immerse yourself in the world of Writing through this collection of carefully curated quotes.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAn editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesThe more you read, the better you're going to become as a storyteller.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorStories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterIt is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsOnly a person who is congenially self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesNo matter what you write, it's a matter of putting words in a certain order so that the reader will be interested in what you're writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple; there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWriting is one way to go about thinking, and the practice and habit of writing not only drain the mind but supply it, too.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesEverybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterReading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWriting is both mask and unveiling.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIt's hard not to be enthusiastic when you like what you're doing and I love what I do. I love writing stories, I love coming up with ideas for new projects and I love the people I work with, because I work with great writers and artists and directors and actors.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWriting is the most solitary of arts.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAll writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesJack [Kirby] and Joe [Simon] wrote and drew the stories themselves in the beginning and I was just, like, the office boy. But after a while they had more writing than they could handle and I was the only guy around, so they said, "Hey Stan, you think you can write this?" When you're seventeen years old, what do you know? I said, "Sure, I can do it!" And that was it.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorYou need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterIf a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWriting is hard work and bad for the health.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesTo be honest, when I was writing these stories a million years ago, I never thought about movies at all one way or another. It would have seemed almost miraculous for these things to be movies someday. To me, they were just comic books that I hoped would sell so I could keep my job.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIf I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterIm merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I'm a reader.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsIt is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIdeally, anything one writes should have a social conscience: if you can write a story that thrills, and with a good message, that's the perfect type of a story.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorThe secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterThe art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI have a reputation for doing superheroes, but I like all kinds of writing. In fact, hardly anybody knows this, but I've probably written as many humor stories as superhero stories.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorOne writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterLike all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsI am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI couldn't say no when I received that offer [to re-invent the DC characters]... How can any writer say no to the opportunity of redoing every one of DC's top superheroes?
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWhen I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that's more or less irrelevant. I think I'm a good reader, I'm a good reader in many languages, especially in English, since poetry came to me through the English language, initially through my father's love of Swinburn, of Tennyson, and also of Keats, Shelley and so on - not through my native tongue, not through Spanish. It came to me as a kind of spell. I didn't understand it, but I felt it.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsThere is simply a better chance of doing well if the writer holds a steady course, enters the stream of English quietly, and does not thrash about.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesIf nobody is looking for a story, and I have no reason to write a story, I would really much rather to do anything else because it's no fun writing stories, particularly not for me. I just do it in order to sell them and make a couple of bucks.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorDon't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAdvice from this elderly practitioner is to forget publishers and just roll a sheet of copy paper into your machine and get lost in your subject.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI don't wake up in the morning and say, wow I've got a great idea for a story. But I sit down, and I figure well, let's see.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIf you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsI have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.
Stan Lee
— Comic Book Icon & Creator of Marvel HeroesI never really am concerned about the political landscape of the day when I'm writing because no matter what it is, it will change. By the time my stories come out, it will have changed. So I never think much about that.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorWriting is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterThe exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWriting is not an exercise in excision, it's a journey into sound.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorAny writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterThe certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsThe main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWrite about it by day and dream about it by night.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIt seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Jorge Luis Borges
— WriterI hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsThere is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the door, no inflexible rules by which the young writer may steer his course. He will often find himself steering by stars that are disturbingly in motion.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAdvice to young writers wo want to get ahead without any annoying delays: don't write about Man, write about a man.
Joyce Carol Oates
— Authorwhile there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsWhen you consider that there are a thousand ways to express even the simplest idea, it is no wonder writers are under a great strain. Writers care greatly how a thing is said - it makes all the difference. So they are constantly faced with too many choices and must make too many decisions.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorMuch of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsThe young writer should learn to spot them: words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning, but that soon burst in the air, leaving nothing but a memory of bright sound.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorAnd I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsHis words span rivers and mountains, but his thoughts are still only six inches long.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorAfter my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAs a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly and unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsDon't write about Man; write about a man.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorThe appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsAnyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorI think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.
E. B. White
— Versatile Writer & Author of Beloved ClassicsA single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.
Joyce Carol Oates
— AuthorIt's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.