Be Written Quotes

#1. Life's most important questions
Should always be written in ALL CAPS

Kim Holden

#2. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.

Timothy Pina

#3. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear's gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.

Richard Bach

#4. I'm gradually managing to cram my mind more and more full of things. I've got this beautiful mind and it's going to die, and it'll all be gone. And then I say, not in my case. Every idea I've ever had I've written down, and it's all there on paper. And I won't be gone; it'll be there.

Isaac Asimov

#5. Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?

Alan Bennett

#6. There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient.

Agnes Repplier

#7. A cabaret song has got to be written - for the middle voice, ideally - because you've got to hear the wit of the words. And a cabaret song gives the singer room to act, more even than an opera singer.

James Fenton

#8. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.

Nadege Richards

#9. I think some period drama can be quite alienating, but 'Downton' isn't. This is going to sound quite, um, pretentious, but someone said that it's like a soap written by a poet.

Michelle Dockery

#10. Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened,

Vera Pavlova

#11. However weak we are, however poor, however little our faith, or however small our grace may be, our names are still written on His heart; nor shall we lose our share in Jesus' love.

Charles Spurgeon

#12. The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.

Augustus William Hare

#13. There will be four ancillary shows on the MyMusic channel, and we'll be updating an entire blog with up-to-the-minute music news. You can visit it like BuzzFeed or Pitchfork and get album reviews. It's all as part of the sitcom experience, written by the characters.

Benny Fine

#14. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.

John McWhorter

#15. As far as you can, do some manual work so as to be able to give alms, for it is written that alms and faith purify from sin.

Poemen

#16. There should be a democracy of voices in literature. There are people who live with a kind of striving and with a certain kind of tenderness - it's not an unusual thing - and maybe that's not written about enough.

Anne Michaels

#17. Create a mould, and pour yourself in it. See what you want to be, and be. Don't fear the pain. Pain is good. Pain is price.

Stephen Lloyd Jones

#18. There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.

Eugenio Montale

#19. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

Philip Larkin

#20. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.

Thomas Jefferson

#21. Sometimes words need music too. Sometimes the descriptions are not enough. Books should be written with soundtracks, like films.

Terry Pratchett

#22. Heresy is usually quite sophisticated, actually has a meaning, and is to be taken very seriously. It is therefore to be carefully distinguished from turgid, pretentious, badly-written Bullsgeshichte, to use the technical German theological term.

Carl R. Trueman

#23. Ignorance could be said is written in bold letters all over the institution that is supposed to be a shining light to the world

Sunday Adelaja

#24. Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.

W.G. Sebald

#25. It's a completely powerful and serious book, as good as anything in prose or poetry written by a 'beat' writer, and one of the most alive books written by any American for years. I don't see how it could be considered immoral.

Robert Lowell

#26. Women are quoted as sources and appear on interview shows much less frequently than men ... But the by-product of such anonymity may be immortality, for women are also less likely to find themselves written up on the obituary page.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson

#27. If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.

Randall Jarrell

#28. Across my life only one work will be written: "waste" _ waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.

Violet Trefusis

#29. Your past has already been written and the words cannot be changed, but your future is waiting to be written; make it a bestseller.

Abigail Landsbrook

#30. To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth.

James Slater

#31. Time lost can never be recovered ... and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.

Erik Larson

#32. Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

Lynn Abbey

#33. Only well-written works will descend to posterity. Fulness of knowledge, interesting facts, even useful inventions, are no pledge of immortality, for they may be employed by more skilful hands; they are outside the man; the style is the man himself.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

#34. That's an aspect of this business which can be very frustrating and aggravating. Most of what is written about you is wrong and so much of what does get printed is often about personal things that you don't want to have other people read about.

Winona Ryder

#35. Everyone's life is an evolution of emotions, spirit and beliefs. The storyline changes, plots thicken, main characters mature and new spiritual journeys begin. This is true of inspirational authors. Their books represent only the stages of their life. New triumphs of the soul have yet to be written!

Shannon L. Alder

#36. They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.

Andrew Barger

#37. how these words, wait to die
in the arms of all the poetry..
yet to be written.

Sanober Khan

#38. In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.

Henry A. Kissinger

#39. Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Franz Kafka

#40. A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.

Miriam Toews

#41. Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty: for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated; even the Stoics regarded urbanity as a virtue.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#42. I was worried that one day, 40 years from now, I would look back and wouldn't be able to remember the details of my life, so I've written them all down.

Alicia Keys

#43. There's a real fantasy quotient to my work. Any play that I've written for myself to perform in basically begins with the idea, "Wouldn't it be fun to be, say, Jean Harlow in a pre-code movie?"

Charles Busch

#44. I think sometimes women who are supposed to be strong are also written as mean and vindictive.

Yancy Butler

#45. That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt.

Kate Atkinson

#46. a poem written for someone special to me, but a woman who I can't be with all the time due to where we are in life right now. Through the distance love can still survive, it just takes a little hard work and stubbornness at time.

Robert Zimmermann

#47. The damage was permanent; there would always be scars. But even the angriest scars faded over time until it was difficult to see them written on the skin at all, and the only thing that remained was the memory of how painful it had been.

Jodi Picoult

#48. I wrote this story the way it needed to be written. I couldn't sugarcoat it. I couldn't water it down. It is this way because the story demands it. I'm not sorry.

Courtney Cole

#49. I'm not just considered a former child star. I'm not considered a black actress. I'm not considered an actress. I've done roles that were written for men. First and foremost is God: I definitely believe in Him having kind of mapped out what my destiny was going to be.

Kim Fields

#50. every line
inside his palm
and every fold
of his skin told me
the men like him
were made to be
written about.

Lauren Eden

#51. Jim [Henson] had written letters to his five children to be opened only after his death. Brian read from his. Jim wrote, 'Be good to each other. Love and forgive everybody.' I remembered Jim telling me that he never wasted energy on hating anybody; he had too much thinking to do.

Caroll Spinney

#52. Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

Eric S. Raymond

#53. What a drug this little book is; to imbibe it is to find oneself presuming his process. I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself. It is not mere envy but a delusional quickening in the blood.

Patti Smith

#54. You had censorship. If you brought a manuscript to the publisher, you knew he would suggest changes. If you wanted to write and speak what you thought had to be written and spoken, you had to act against all these suppressive rules.

Stefan Heym

#55. It doesn't need to be imagined, it needs to be written down.

Philip Glass

#56. I wrote 'The Facebook Era' because I felt like it needed to be written, and I was one of the people who might be qualified to do so. Specifically, my background is that I developed the first business application on Facebook.

Clara Shih

#57. No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it's only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

Paul Auster

#58. My first in, my first break, was I met a director and got to talking with her, and she happened to be casting this movie that she had written. That was ten years ago. That got me to Hollywood. I got paid $700 bucks.

Chris Pratt

#59. (As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.

Anonymous

#60. I've written a lot of wordy, erudite, pretentious songs, but believe it or not, I'm usually doing my damnedest to resist the temptation to be overly "clever," and trying to keep things as accessible - and singable - as possible.

Peter Blegvad

#61. I've never written poetry. I'm not a poet, but I think the nearest you get is either the short story or the novella, in that you can't waste a word. There is no hiding place: everything's got to be seen to relate, and the prose counts.

Susan Hill

#62. Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.

Oscar Wilde

#63. If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.

Margaret Atwood

#64. He's a sculpture. Painstakingly chiseled into perfection over the course of years, until arias could be written about his eyebrows, his cheekbones, the freaking shape of his nostrils. And me? Well, I'm probably a finger-painting. Done by a three-year-old. Without supervision.

Julie Johnson

#65. The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands.

Helene Cixous

#66. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

Charles Dickens

#67. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.

Sefi Atta

#68. I think no one but me has the right to write about my life as I want to write it in a particular way. I don't think any other person will be able to tell the story of my life like how I have approached it. It works best when it's written by someone who has experienced it herself.

Preity Zinta

#69. When you've written a movie, you then get together with a whole lot of people and make it. In many ways, I think it is far nicer to be with people rather than being completely solitary.

Neil Jordan

#70. Pretty much at all times music motivates me. How can I say this without sounding in any way proud of myself? Obviously I've always written songs that are critical of our government, and talk about our times. Hopefully you attempt to be timeless while doing it.

Eddie Vedder

#71. To create an album of love, I really had - I thought it was going to be easy, because I've always written love songs. But I thought if I really want to make a love album that contributes, that actually means something, I've got to go deep.

Jason Mraz

#72. When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

C.L.R. James

#73. ROM10.15 And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things! ROM10.16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?

Anonymous

#74. Most writers enjoy two periods of happiness - when a glorious idea comes to mind, and when a last page has been written and you haven't had time to know how much better it ought to be

J.B. Priestley

#75. She is incomplete, a part-written recipe. How can she imagine what she will be if she only knows half of her ingredients?

Carys Bray

#76. I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.

Irvin D. Yalom

#77. It would be something that another person had written down without understanding its significance; just a sentence or two that would be like a flash of light.

Jeanne DuPrau

#78. I have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and am of opinion that the volume contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains of eloquence, than can be collected from all other books, in whatever language they may have been written.

William Jones

#79. All Scripture ought to be read in the spirit in which it was written.

Thomas A Kempis

#80. The greatest of all the Sioux in my time, or in any time for that matter, was that wonderful old fighting man, Sitting Bull, whose life will some day be written by a historian who can really give him his due.

Buffalo Bill

#81. I don't understand labels. I don't need anybody to tell me I'm Latina or black or anything else. I've played characters that were written for Caucasian females, I just want to be given the same consideration as everybody else, and so far that has been happening.

Zoe Saldana

#82. I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.

Val McDermid

#83. Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#84. A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting.

Lydia Davis

#85. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things: I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all.

Claire-Louise Bennett

#86. If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.

Jefferson Davis

#87. My very first acting job was with Alan Parker on' Angela's Ashes,' but as a child, I had written to so many other productions just applying for any role. I always wanted to be an actress, and I did loads of acting summer schools.

Kerry Condon

#88. I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

Jon Spaihts

#89. Written music is like nothing in the world - an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it's almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section.

Richard Powers

#90. The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it. Only then may the book, the real live flawed finite book, slowly, sentence by carnal sentence, appear.

Bonnie Friedman

#91. Back in college, when I got kicked out of school, I was still in school, I'd just written the song that got me my record deal. If I hadn't gotten kicked out of school I wouldn't be where I am now. Three months after that, I got my record deal and the rest is history.

Brian McKnight

#92. As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

Henry Petroski

#93. The idea that Jesus never really died on the cross can be found in the Koran, which was written in the seventh century--in fact, Ahmadiyya Muslims contend that Jesus actually fled to India. To this day there's a shrine that supposedly marks his real burial place in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Lee Strobel

#94. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

Ambrose Bierce

#95. As long as there are people in education making excuses for failure, cursing future generations with a culture of low expectations, denying children access to the best that has been thought and written, because Nemo and the Mister Men are more relevant, the battle needs to be joined.

Michael Gove

#96. Life is like a book written with lots of surprises,
Spell it wrongly and you'll be spilled otherwise.

Ana Claudia Antunes

#97. Life is supposed to be a risk. It's written everywhere around us. We are meant to take chances. We are meant to explode and shatter and spiral. Even if we break, we'll come back to a still point. We are made that way, just another natural element, if we remember to stay natural.

Katie Kacvinsky

#98. If true computer music were ever written, it would only be listened to by other computers.

Michael Crichton

#99. A lot of the songs are written on piano or guitar, so I contribute, and I have done so since the beginning. So it's been good to be involved completely musically as well.

Caroline Corr

#100. In the life of any actor or actress, there is inevitably a time when they will be eligible to act in a Tom Stoppard play. He has written a lot, and they are revived often, and there are so many characters of different ages that it was more likely I'd end up in something of his than that I wouldn't.

Ed Stoppard