Top 88 Purpose For Writing Quotes
#1. I think there's no purpose for writing music if it is not meaningful.
Darren Fletcher
#2. A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.
Samuel Johnson
#3. This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.
Franz Kafka
#4. I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.
Theodora Goss
#5. Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;
William Faulkner
#6. Don't be indifferent about any random idea that occurs to you, because each and every idea is for a particular purpose. it may not be beneficial to you, but can be what others are craving for
Michael Bassey Johnson
#7. The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.
S.A. Tawks
#8. This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.
Eugen Herrigel
#9. The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
George Orwell
#10. I say you ought to write out 10 outrageous goals that are bigger than you because your life isn't meaningful or important unless you're on purpose about something way bigger than you are.
Mark Victor Hansen
#11. It ended up being a very good thing, because they finally started writing for the character, and I realized that you have to go to work with a purpose. I learned from the experience and then moved on.
Matthew Ashford
#12. I tend to basically exaggerate in life, and in writing, it's fine to exaggerate. I really enjoy overstating for the purpose of getting a laugh. For another thing, writing is easier than digging ditches. Well, actually, that's an exaggeration. It isn't.
Dr. Seuss
#13. No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
#14. But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
Umberto Eco
#15. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.
Jonathan Franzen
#16. He's trying to do info-tainment. He doesn't really want to talk about trans issues, he wants to sensationalize my life and not really talk about the work that I do and what the purpose of me writing this book was about.
Janet Mock
#18. Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.
Tatyana Tolstaya
#19. The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
William, Saroyan
#20. The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
[Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech]
John Steinbeck
#21. Study with purpose, both in church and in school. Write down your goals and what you plan to do to achieve them. Aim high, for you are capable ...
Thomas S. Monson
#22. My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best.
Anthony Trollope
#23. On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?
David Morrell
#24. We sit on park benches and beaches and couches and hilltops, listening and dreaming seemingly to no particular purpose. But isn't it often the case that when we cease to move and think, we see and hear and understand a great deal?
Brian Doyle
#25. The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.
Clifford Allbutt
#26. My reason for being an author? Because I love to write - it fulfills me. But the fact that I entertain others by doing it is a lovely bonus.
Chasta Schneider
#27. My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men.
William Soutar
#28. Today, everything I do from morning meditation on - eating breakfast, going for a walk, writing, reading, even recreation - is governed by one purpose only: how to give the very best account of my life that I can in the service of all.
Eknath Easwaran
#29. Punctuation is the art of dividing a written composition into sentences, or parts of sentences, by points or stops, for the purpose of marking the different pauses which the sense, and an accurate pronunciation require.
Lindley Murray
#30. Poetry can have varied and useful functions; and seduction is apparently something worth writing poetry for.
Shira Wolosky
#31. I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. [ ... ] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.
Kenneth Rexroth
#32. Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.
Mark McMorris
#33. Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good.
Hilary Mantel
#34. The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve ... something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness - those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.
Joy Williams
#35. I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.
Brian Kernighan
#36. I think novelists, when they write their books, end up having occasionally serving a purpose and playing roles that they never really fully either intended or even understood.
Khaled Hosseini
#37. So yeah, it's nothing that I'm doing on purpose, I just think that the more records, the more songs that I write, the more records that I make, you're obviously going to fall into a specific style and thank God it's a style that people are into.
Kenny Chesney
#38. Good writing - good stories - are the imagination's firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.
Stephen King
#39. Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction.
Robert Lowell
#40. Hand writing causes thinking - the repetition of writing your goal everyday will increase your awareness. The true purpose of a goal is to help you grow.
Bob Proctor
#41. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
James A. Owen
#42. I have little or no concern at how people interpret my writing, my only concern is to write it.
Robert Black
#43. Through my writing, I want to build an "immortal fountain of love" where everyone can come to dance and enjoy the colorful "flow of joy" and sing along with the music of love.
Debasish Mridha
#44. Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction:
Simply to participate.
Alan Moore
#45. The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
John Gardner
#46. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
Annie Ernaux
#47. Today is your wright-time. Anything worth writing will be, or has been written already. A great story chooses its writer lest no wright should boast. Just write! If you don't, you will come right in contact with your thoughts someplace soon.
Amah Lambert
#48. I write because it's all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I'm stuck in the hell of writer's block, which I'm happy to report only occurs about once a day.
Sue Grafton
#49. The purpose of paragraphing is to give the reader a rest. The writer is saying ... : Have you got that? If so, I'll go to the next point.
Henry Watson Fowler
#50. Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author.
Debasish Mridha
#51. Mr. Franzen said he and Mr. Wallace, over years of letters and conversations about the ethical role of the novelist, had come to the joint conclusion that the purpose of writing fiction was "a way out of loneliness."
(NY Times article on the memorial service of David Foster Wallace.)
Jonathan Franzen
#52. What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
Nadine Gordimer
#53. The purpose of my writing, whatever I write, is not what may be right or wrong;
But for when I leave this body, my writings should remain that others may share.
Gian Kumar
#54. It's good when someone says, "Would you write a song for this purpose," or "would you record a song for this purpose," or "would you help me realize this song," again, for this purpose.
Will Oldham
#55. For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#56. If your purpose is to make money, you shouldn't get into writing.
Amish Tripathi
#57. The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#58. I have decided on my destiny; accepted by calling as writing for God.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#59. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
#60. One of the most important thing is that you need to write down your goals and plans
Sunday Adelaja
#61. The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
Bill Watterson
#62. I state the threefold purpose of my travels in Arabia: to see the country, to write about it and to be of some service to its people and their cause - that is what brought me from beyond the seas, from America.
Ameen Rihani
#63. If fiction and fantasy books are escapism, then let an author write them so as to better equip the reader to face reality by the end.
Brett Armstrong
#64. The greatest thing about writing is that you get to shape more than one life.
Katja Michael
#65. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#66. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
#67. You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element - be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point - and say why it's there.
Diana Gabaldon
#68. Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.
Michael McDowell
#69. The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
John Mason Brown
#70. 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
#71. The best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it, i.e., share it with others?
Brenda Ueland
#72. He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.
Carson McCullers
#74. Either give it your all or don't even try!
Avijeet Das
#75. Whether I'm writing about plumbers or psychics or psychic plumbers, I want to find a creative space that imprisons me usefully, so I can deviate with purpose.
Heidi Julavits
#76. Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.
Henning Mankell
#77. I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.
May Sarton
#78. In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.
Sam Shepard
#79. The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.
Berry Gordy
#80. The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.
J.P. Donleavy
#81. I've found that busting your ass on a daily basis to make your art good, clear, and meaningful creates the most luck.
Don Roff
#82. I often wonder if I have fulfilled my purpose. I believe the key to living life to the fullest is to always be recognizing opportunities and following your own path. To enjoy every minute, whether it's writing a novel, giving a speech, or petting the kitties, it's your life.
David Mezzapelle
#83. My purpose in writing novels is to expose man's inhumanity to man.
Carly Compass
#84. When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.
John C. Bean
#85. Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.
Sara Sheridan
#86. When I discovered music - when I discovered the craft of shaping a song - my being fell into place.
Charlotte Eriksson
#87. My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald
#88. It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.
Vladimir Nabokov
