Top 100 Philosophy Of Writing Quotes
#1. 'Dreamsongs' allows me to show the scope of my writing - with personal commentary that puts the works in context and includes some autobiographical details intended to reveal how each piece came to be, what it represents, and how it has formed, or been informed by, my philosophy of writing.
George R R Martin
#2. Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Ray Bradbury
#3. The creative mind is the playful mind. Philosophy is the play and dance of ideas.
Eric Hoffer
#4. There's a difference between the 'art' of writing and the 'craft' of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.
Gerard De Marigny
#5. [Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy ... They lack an anchor for their real self.
Billy Graham
#6. Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
Rebecca Goldstein
#7. I was working in silence seeking no appreciation or respect from any one. And it is always the silence from which great literature is born.
Abhijit Naskar
#8. The statement 'There is nothing more American than an Indian' happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.
Charles Slagle
#9. It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
#10. Because here's the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.
Steven Brust
#11. The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?
Gilles Deleuze
#14. 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
#16. Our lives are a novel being written. We are its author. Every action we encounter and every person we meet has a role and a place in our ultimate story. It is in our control to decide the level of how, who and what impacts us and how large a role we decide to assign each.
Mark W. Boyer
#17. Writing is the dancing of the mind on a stage called paper.
Debasish Mridha
#18. Writing about oneself is an egotistical adventure unless the act of self-exploration revolves around the distinct goal of heightening a person's cache of knowledge, ideas, and level of self-awareness.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#19. Confusion of a Writer - Sometimes I want all limelight to shine on me and sometimes I just want to vanish underneath the deep waters.
Nikita Dudani
#20. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
#21. My purpose of writing is to express my love for you,
no matter, who you are, where you live or whatever you do.
Debasish Mridha
#22. In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
Jacques Derrida
#23. In politics, the pen is at its heaviest because it is weighed down by the collective responsibility it holds towards its people and their future in the eyes of the world.
Aysha Taryam
#26. When I sleep tonight I dream of what I will imagine tomorrow.
T.A. Uner
#27. As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.
Andre Dubus III
#28. Writing is a disease of the mind, which is expressed through a pen.
Debasish Mridha
#29. And as their penile pain began to subside, the two men were able to form more complex thoughts, resulting in a collaborative work: the development of a worldview that might be described as penilosophy.
Zack Love
#30. Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.
Linda Nelson
#31. I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book - my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me - and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition upon modesty.
Max Ehrmann
#32. Writing comes from the fear of failure not from the joy of winning.
Debasish Mridha
#33. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#34. Philosophy can forsake too easily the details of experience ... many writers and painters have demonstrated that thinking long about what art is or ought to be ruins the power to write or paint.
Robert Adams
#36. If my life was pulled into the pages of a book, there would be coffee stains and wrinkles along the lines of that narrative. Because all I can wish is that the book of my life would be well read and well loved. Living within words and the sound of writing.
F.K. Preston
#37. It's a sort of philosophy you cook up for yourself. You probably write things the same as everybody else, but it's your own personal way of saying things.
Jim Capaldi
#38. If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
Noel Coward
#39. I wish I could run into the world's arms. Linger within the spaces between nothing. I wish I could filter out of existence. To live quietly without dying. I wish I could be cherished by life itself. To speak and sing volumes without lying to myself.
F.K. Preston
#40. Insisting that his writing did not offer a philosophy of life, Hardy claims that each poem was an 'impression', intensely subjective and evanescent.
Geoffrey Harvey
#41. The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#42. Where do they go, these dreams of mine? Do they live? Do they die? Do they fall? Do they fly?
F.K. Preston
#43. Poetry is more than a form of art. It's a vibration and a pulsing heart. Whether it's sour or whether it's sweet. It can give you strength no one can defeat
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#46. Well, for instance, why does everything always have to be written from the point of view of a human being? Why not write from the point of view of a cat? Or a tree?
Austin Scott Collins
#47. The life of your body may be sustained by daily bread and rice, but the life of your soul may only be sustained by the fruit of wisdom.
Subhan Zein
#49. Through the years the swirl of a pen, click of a key, and the idea of a story have been my deepest passion. I never just decided to become a writer. I was born to be a writer. I knew it from childhood.
Sai Marie Johnson
#51. Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.
William Blake
#52. A writer should feel deeply from his heart of the joys and sorrows of people. And he must write as honestly as possible. Then only can he claim to be a writer.
Avijeet Das
#54. Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Charles Kettering
#57. My writings are the mirror of my soul and the dance of my mind.
Debasish Mridha
#58. Writing is a wonderful voyage of discovery. So sit down and write, and see where your mind can take you ...
Sarah Jane Avory
#59. Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?
Terry Eagleton
#60. The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.
Mason Cooley
#61. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill.
If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
- Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
The Silkworm
J.K. Rowling
#62. To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is. However, at this particular moment I cannot find so much to laugh at as I would like.
Noel Coward
#64. As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?
Criss Jami
#65. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#66. When you have something meaningful to say, you lose your desire for much grammar; for only in the incompetence of words does one seek the redeeming power of vocabulary.
King Samuel Benson
#67. Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.
Jonathan Franzen
#68. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#70. More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.
M.V. Carey
#71. And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by.
Avijeet Das
#73. The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.
Bankei Yotaku
#74. One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.
Gail Godwin
#75. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#76. The survival of poor opinions can make a thinker feel as though he is failing humanity.
Criss Jami
#77. A pen, a piece of white paper, and an idea can create a new you.
Debasish Mridha
#78. To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.
D.A. Botta
#79. The challenge of a journalist is to condense a thousand thoughts into a single sound bite. The challenge of an author is to place a simple idea on a canvas as infinite as your imagination. No doubt about it. I have the easier job.
Charles A. Cornell
#80. Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.
Debasish Mridha
#81. I still lack a political, religious, and philosophical world view. I change it every month, so I'll have to limit myself to the description of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
Anton Chekhov
#82. You cannot write your character until you know how he or she thinks, until you know what their philosophy is in the world that they occupy.
Don Roff
#83. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
Danielle M. Maistry
#84. While you're governing the colony and I'm writing political philosophy, They'll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other's room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
Orson Scott Card
#85. You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.
Larry Correia
#86. When I told my teachers I wanted to be a writer, alot of them encouraged me to lower my expectations and to be more realistic. So I rode away on my magical, winged horse, spraying faerie dust behind me, and laughing manically as I went.
M.E. Vaughan
#87. Just being a writer allows one the maturity to have random conversations with random strangers!
Avijeet Das
#88. For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you'd really like to read.
Brett Armstrong
#89. I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.
P.D. James
#91. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
Bertrand Russell
#92. Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.
J.P. Donleavy
#94. Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person's level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#95. Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#96. The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#97. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#98. Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author.
Debasish Mridha
#99. Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind.
Debasish Mridha
#100. Bear in mind that the novel
no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective
is always an historical projection of its own time.
Samuel R. Delany
