Top 100 Man Writing Quotes
#1. Without a great man writing and directing for me, I realised I was a mediocre movie star at best.
Diane Keaton
#2. My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.
Vladimir Nabokov
#3. I don't think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.
Robert Creeley
#4. Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
Vladimir Nabokov
#5. And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#6. I have known many an instance of a man writing a letter and forgetting to sign his name, but this is the only instance I have ever known of a man signing his name and forgetting to write the letter.
Henry Ward Beecher
#7. To use many words to communicate few thoughts is everywhere the unmistakable sign of mediocrity. To gather much thought into few words stamps the man of genius.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#8. The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public ... What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him?
Amado Nervo
#9. Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.
Graham Moore
#10. Everything a man writes about himself is instructive.
John Glassco
#11. But I account the use that a man should seek of the publishing of his own writings before his death, to be but an untimely anticipation of that which is proper to follow a man, and not to go along with him.
Francis Bacon
#12. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
#13. Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.
Brooks Atkinson
#14. When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes drunk, I thought. He is like me.
Anais Nin
#15. For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.
Red Smith
#16. I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.
Sherwood Anderson
#17. When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.
Anthony Trollope
#18. It's about a young man who has climbed to fame and he discovers that his writing and the relationship with his wife are really more important for him than anything else.
Ismail Merchant
#19. A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
Randall Jarrell
#20. The writer who cannot sometimes throw away a thought about which another man would have written dissertations, without worry whether or not the reader will find it, will never become a great writer.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#21. The Romans believed that what no man controls, no man can own. Justinian, writing in the sixth century AD, said that the air, flowing water, the sea and the seashore were common to all.
Charles Clover
#22. A man could scarcely make his writing a reason for living unless he believed in the validity of that writing.
Paul Bowles
#23. He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.
Coco J. Ginger
#24. I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.
Julie Walters
#25. I had very little support from any feminist organization. But fortunately my post-marital lover, who had bailed out of academia over political in-fighting, was a one-man support team. He was the one who pushed me to write.
Betty Dodson
#26. Writing has made me a better man. It has put me in contact with those fleeting moments which prove the existence.
Ishmael Reed
#27. Rejection is a part of any man's life. If you can't accept and move past rejection, or at least use it as writing material - you're not a real man.
-Master Jiraiya
Masashi Kishimoto
#28. In every letter, in every line, she saw him. He hadn't changed - he'd only grown into the man he'd meant to be.
Diana Peterfreund
#30. I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on.
-Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine
Oliver Harris
#31. Passonate, irreverent, utterly relevant, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk offers an unforgettable portrait of a reluctant hero. Ben Fountain writes like a man inspired and his razor sharp exploration of our contemporary ironies will break your heart.
Margot Livesey
#32. I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade ... the rivers of blood are flowing beneath our feet ... Ive been to hell, young man, youve only read about it.
Marquis De Sade
#33. writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself.
William Zinsser
#34. Between writing, traveling, speaking, preaching, and doing my best to be a good husband to my wife and my three kids, that's about as much as one man or at least this man can do.
Tullian Tchividjian
#35. But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!
Not what he pleases, but what he can.
George MacDonald
#36. Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
Thomas Keneally
#37. I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.
Samuel Johnson
#38. I'm very much a man of the moment. I can think about an idea for a year, two years, even four years all right, but what ever is going on with me the moment I write is gonna work it's way into the piece.
Quentin Tarantino
#39. And why should any man who writes, even if he writes things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? Your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?
George Gissing
#40. God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Richard Brookhiser
#41. In my first novel the heroine didn't get her man, in my second the heroine was 64 years old, my third was a romantic suspense set behind the Iron Curtain, my fourth had no wedding bells, not even in the far distance.
Maynah Lewis
#42. Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the ...
Rex Stout
#43. Joss Whedon is a hero of mine, and what he's done for women in film and television, particularly when it comes to writing female roles that would typically go to a man, is awesome.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#44. But the nice man had cold eyes. When interacting with his fascinated lady-harem, they had been blue. But when he turned his attention to me - however briefly - I could have sworn that they turned gray, the color of water beneath a sky from which snow will soon fall.
Stephen King
#45. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
#46. Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton.
Jacob Needleman
#47. The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
Gilles Deleuze
#49. To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.
Charles Bukowski
#50. To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
#51. The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.
Tony Robbins
#52. I don't know if I have some kind of defiance disorder or something, but if I'm hired to write something by "The Man," or by a studio, for whatever reason, it's really hard for me to finish. I inevitably wind up using that time to write something else.
Diablo Cody
#53. I can taste fear, and lies, on a man's skin, Cavrax." The Master Priest whispered, watching the large pulse on the cleric's neck beat like a caged thing begging for release. "You're lying to me.
C.N. Faust
#54. Personally, I do not believe that it is the duty of any man or woman to write a novel. In nine cases out of ten, there would be greater merit in leaving it unwritten.
Agnes Repplier
#55. Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.
Arnost Lustig
#56. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
R.M. Engelhardt
#57. But those who cannot write, and those who can, All rhyme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.
Alexander Pope
#58. If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.
Fernando Pessoa
#59. I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.
Ryan Adams
#60. I've been wondering about Dostoyevsky. How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?
Ernest Hemingway,
#61. Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#62. I'm seen as somebody who writes for adults because I'm an older man myself. Some of them find me, and a lot of them don't.
Stephen King
#63. Just at the moment he's writing a book on famine - goodness! it's sad - and there's a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.
Nancy Mitford
#64. I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals ... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.
Louis L'Amour
#66. One should write not unskillfully in the running hand, be able to sing in a pleasing voice and keep good time to music; and, lastly, a man should not refuse a little wine when it is pressed upon him.
Yoshida Kenko
#67. That man has a spiritual body is evidenced by the account ... given in the writings of Moses that man was created spiritually in heaven before he was given a natural body.
J. Reuben Clark
#68. A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
H.L. Mencken
#69. Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone.
Cesare Pavese
#70. If you are a married man resident in Cuba, you cannot get a passport to go to the next town without your wife's permission in writing.
Edward Burnett Tylor
#71. Nowadays, the Internet decides if you're good, not the big man in the big office. No matter how important that man thinks he is, everyone else knows that he's not important anymore, and the Internet decides these things, here in the modern age.
Alexei Maxim Russell
#72. No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.
Gerald Stanley Lee
#73. To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.
Ernest Renan
#74. If I were a young man, I would not hesitate at writing anything to get into print, except pornography.
James A. Michener
#75. Last night, I was a mad man searching for a whiff of your fragrance. The stars and the moon even laughed at me.
Avijeet Das
#76. Method is not less requisite in ordinary conversation than in writing, provided a man would talk to make himself understood.
Joseph Addison
#77. Man is the animal who weeps and laughs - and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back - in a book.
John Cowper Powys
#78. One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond external facts and gives the inmost motives. One of the most mendacious is autobiography.
Theodor Haecker
#79. Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#80. Songwriting is determined by me, man ... just me. I write from real life, you ...
T-Pain
#81. Writing, not dancing, is the chosen form of expression of the white man.
Gerald Jonas
#82. I ain't no author, man ... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.
Steve Harvey
#83. It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.
Tina Fey
#85. It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.
Mahatma Gandhi
#86. I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me.
James Herriot
#87. If a man begins writing at thirty, by the time he is fifty or sixty, the bulk of his work has been done. By the time he is eighty, he's got nothing more, you know?
V.S. Naipaul
#88. A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.
Thomas Paine
#89. When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Samuel Butler
#90. There is no moral to my song,
I praise no right, I blame no wrong;
I tell of things that I have seen,
I show the man that I have been
As simply as a poet can
Who knows himself poet and man.
Thomas MacDonagh
#91. A man who has any relish for fine writing either discovers new beauties or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him; besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.
Joseph Addison
#92. I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.
Tim O'Brien
#93. You've seen yourself how difficult the writing is to decipher with your eyes, but our man deciphers it with his wounds.
Franz Kafka
#94. Susie, what shall I do - there is'nt room enough; not half enough, to hold what I was going to say. Wont you tell the man who makes sheets of paper, that I hav'nt the slightest respect for him!
Emily Dickinson
#95. After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#96. In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
Thomas Carlyle
#97. Write me as one who loves his fellow men.
Leigh Hunt
#98. The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man's quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.
Benjamin Percy
#99. The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.
James Jones
#100. As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.
Rod Serling
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