Quotes About Powerful Writing

#1. I read 'The Conspiracy Against the Human Race' and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer's ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster.

Nic Pizzolatto

#2. YOU CAN'T TELL UNLESS YOU SHOW FIRST ... Showing makes the telling more powerful because your senses and your mind are both engaged.

Pat Pattison

#3. The first thing I check once I'm inside a story is the emotional weather. Is there a storm coming? What's the temperature, and how powerful are the winds? The difference between walking on water and sliding one's ass across slick ice is only a matter of degree.

Bob Thurber

#4. There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.

Carla H. Krueger

#5. For me, the most powerful way to write about something is through the absence of it. Rather than writing about what it was to become a new mother, I wrote, for example, a father facing death and addressing his estranged son about the regrets of his relationship.

Nicole Krauss

#6. I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space - all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out.

May Sarton

#7. They think written words are even more powerful,' whispered the toad. 'They think all writing is magic. Words worry them. See their swords? They glow blue in the presence of lawyers.

Terry Pratchett

#8. It scares me that people are going to stop writing music. I don't mean music that has to be physically written down, but they'll stop using their brain which is without a doubt the most powerful tool that you could have in any art.

Glenn Branca

#9. Expressing political opinion can be a powerful way to establish a character's voice when writing fiction.

Jen Lancaster

#10. When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.

Sandra Cisneros

#11. Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.

Juan Enriquez

#12. Unless you loosen the hold that your past has on you, your future will unfold in much the same way ... it is time to begin writing a new script that accurately reflects the beautiful, powerful, and worthy being you are.

David Simon

#13. Journaling has become one of the most gratifying and fulfilling practices of my life. Not only do I derive the daily benefits of consciously directing my thoughts and putting them in writing, but even more powerful are those I have gained from reviewing my journals.

Hal Elrod

#14. The twentieth century has built up a powerful set of intellectual shortcuts and devices that help us defend ourselves against moments when clouds suddenly appear to think.

Charles Baxter

#15. In a newspaper, you only have so much room. It teaches you the value of getting to the point, of not pampering yourself with your glorious writing. I've always been much more interested in one powerful sentence that stays with you. That's my style.

Mitch Albom

#16. Chopper Read attended a writing school I gave for inmates at Risdon Prison in Hobart many years ago. Even if I hadn't known about his hacked-off ears and his criminal history, I'd have found him powerful and compelling.

Garry Disher

#17. Writing is the most powerful weapon on earth.It can change minds and stir souls.

D. Anne Paris

#18. I think to write fiction you have to have a powerful need/desire to connect. I can't. Wanting to and not being able to has lead to a lot of misery in my life.

Henry Rollins

#19. You gave me a soul touch. A touch beyond physical. The most powerful of touch. I thought it was about you but I was wrong it was about me. In me. It took me a lifetime to realize it was me, not you. Thank you for showing me my soul.

Renae A. Sauter

#20. [G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.

Kate Wright

#21. The earth doesn't care where death occurs ... It's the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death's memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.

Sally Mann

#22. Writing is powerful. Whether it's a little girl hiding from the Nazis in an attic, or Amnesty International writing letters on behalf of political prisoners, the power of telling stories is usually what causes change.

Erin Gruwell

#23. Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.

Sam Shepard

#24. Writing is a weapon and it's more powerful than a fist could ever be.

Denzel Washington

#25. A list of your own making is the most powerful list of all ... The good stuff can be 'love at first sight' - in need of study, courting and claiming. And like a love note, it's nice to have things in writing.

Robert Genn

#26. Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.

Amy Neftzger

#27. One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

Philip Yancey

#28. A life lived as variously as Roger's, and evoked in writing as powerful as his, means that even after death his influence continues to flow outwards. Green Man-like, he appears in unexpected places, speaking in leaves.

Robert Macfarlane

#29. Words are the most powerful thing in the universe ... Words are containers. They contain faith, or fear, and they produce after their kind.

Charles Capps

#30. I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

Amy Waldman

#31. I write with music. I write scenes in movies that hopefully can earn the use of some songs that are powerful to me.

Cameron Crowe

#32. When it comes to other people's writing, my older influences are more powerful than more recent ones, partially because I'm now more worried that I'll suddenly accidentally steal something from another writer.

Elizabeth McCracken

#33. A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

H.P. Lovecraft

#34. I believe innately in the human spirit being a powerful and positive thing. And that just comes out, whether you like it or not. It comes out in the writing.

Simon Beaufoy

#35. I think training in comedy, as it were, a history writing comedy, is a powerful tool for anyone.

Steven Moffat

#36. Personally, I think so-called "common language" is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow" just isn't.

J.R. Ward

#37. As they say, it's possible to kill and to revive someone using a proper speech. I agree with the statement because I know for sure it is true.

Sahara Sanders

#38. Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.

Gillian Cross

#39. When you write a piece of software you assume a certain type of hardware. If you assume hardware that's too powerful then you can't sell many copies cause very few people have that machine. If you assume hardware that's too simple your product can't do as much.

Bill Gates

#40. I had discovered that writing
with whatever instrument
was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#41. Don't say that poetry, my friend, is beautiful
or powerful
for there is no powerful or beautiful poetry
There is poetry that strikes you, secretly
with the diseases of writing and schizophrenia, and you rave
and your self leaves you for another

Mahmoud Darwish

#42. Any time a beloved character is killed off, it affects the audience in a very powerful way, especially in a series.

Darynda Jones

#43. I think that we're in a really amazing time, where there are really a lot of really fantastic female actresses and comedians. I imagine there's just a lot of opportunity for women to have powerful roles. Or it's just that there's more women writing TV. Women tend to maybe write strong women.

Whitney Cummings

#44. Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

Robert Morgan

#45. The fact of picking up an instrument and writing a song and expressing yourself publicly has a powerful political dimension

J. Robbins

#46. Not all writing is political or revolutionary, but the very act of giving yourself permission to write, to speak, to share the truth no matter whether the truth you understand is the truth others want to acknowledge, is brave, powerful, and important.

Dinty W. Moore

#47. Readers don't want to read about somebody else having powerful emotions ... Readers want to become somebody else for a few hours, to live an exciting life, to find true love, to face down unimaginable terrors, to solve impossible puzzles, to feel a lightning jolt of adrenaline.

Randy Ingermanson

#48. Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.

Stewart Stern

#49. Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. ... All those things.

R.M. Engelhardt

#50. If you're serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured and unique individual, keep a journal. Don't trust your memory. When you listen to something valuable, write it down. When you come across something important, write it down.

Jim Rohn

#51. I grew up with older brothers, adore them, can't imagine going through life without them, and I definitely think I draw on that love when I'm writing about siblings. It's so powerful, the jump-in-front-of-a-train-to-protect-them kind of love.

Jandy Nelson

#52. What I have written-and how I came to write it-is most powerfully what I am.

Hortense Calisher

#53. Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power?

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#54. A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Alice Steinbach

#55. Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.

Eric T. Benoit

#56. Writing is another powerful way to sharpen the mental saw. Keeping a journal of our thoughts, experiences, insights, and learnings promotes mental clarity, exactness, and context.

Stephen Covey

#57. The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.

Natalie Goldberg

#58. An imagination submitted to the movement of the Holy Spirit is a powerful tool in the hands of God to write testaments of His glory.

Alisa Hope Wagner

#59. Of all the most devastating sounds in the universe, silence is the most powerful.

Gerard De Marigny

#60. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

Kim Edwards

#61. Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen.

Mark Helprin

#62. Rhythm is one of the most powerful of pleasures, and when we feel a pleasurable rhythm we hope it will continue. When it does, it grows sweeter.

Mary Oliver

#63. Storytellers are powerful and we are all storytellers.

Tsara Shelton

#64. I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.

H. Raven Rose

#65. It's true that I have very little idea what I shall be writing next, but at the same time I have a powerful premonition of everything that lies ahead of me, even ten years ahead.

J.G. Ballard

#66. The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

Galen Rowell

#67. Writing is both bomb and bomb disposal-a necessary shattering of cliche and assumption, and a powerful defusing of the soul-destroying messages of modern life (that nothing matters, nothing changes, money is everything, etc). Writing is a state of being as well as an act of doing.

Jeanette Winterson

#68. Hiresha felt something she struggled to describe. Power and possibility swirled within her, along with a a sense of gasping potential in each moment. When she could a find a name for it, tears beaded her eyes. I am awake.

A.E. Marling

#69. 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

#70. I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature's killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that's not the word.

Ander Monson

#71. Your words are so powerful that they can break
hearts or fill them with joy. Your words have
the ability to comfort a wounded soul or shatter
someone's confidence. Your words can act as your
messengers of hope or a salve for a broken human
being.

Rachel C. Weingarten

#72. I'm writing a film. With our access to these powerful media, we're going to take over, because it's really disgusting what is put out there now to be consumed.

Lisa Bonet

#73. I have a mess in my head sometimes, and there's something very satisfying about putting it into words. Certainly it's not something that you're in charge of, necessarily, but writing about it, putting it into your words, can be a very powerful experience.

Carrie Fisher

#74. As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was a far more powerful tool for healing than anyone had ever imagined.

James W. Pennebaker

#75. Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible.

Diana Gabaldon

#76. Don't waste your tremendous voice writing messages in the sand.

Lorin Morgan-Richards

#77. More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.

Susan Stewart

#78. Poets should never stop writing, because their words could be a powerful inspiration to someone else, whether it be now or 100 years from today.

Delano Johnson

#79. You gotta trust your artist. I love writing pages without dialogue, which seems weird, I guess. But few things are as powerful in comics as a really strong silent page.

Jason Aaron

#80. Writing is a struggle against the silence where words can have a powerful impact in just a split second and change your life forever ...

Lisa Jones

#81. Brevity in writing is very powerful

Lance Greenfield

#82. The human desire to know why is as powerful as the desire to know what happened next, and it is a desire of a higher order.

Janet Burroway

#83. Sometimes, I'll craft a scene that's so poignant; on the last keystroke I'll raise my hands high overhead and scream "Yes!" at the top of my lungs. I have yet to experience an orgasm so powerful and fulfilling.

Max Hawthorne

#84. Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy. The most powerful tool that we have to strengthen literacy is often the most underused and overlooked, and that is a child's own stories.

Pam Allyn

#85. If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

Stan Lee