Quotes About Purpose In Writing

#1. If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.

M.R. James

#2. My purpose in writing novels is to expose man's inhumanity to man.

Carly Compass

#3. The purpose of writing inspirational notes is simply to build others up because there are too many people in the demolition business.

Norman Vincent Peale

#4. One purpose in my writing is to help people expand their own understanding of what it means to be human.

Foster Laverne Harding

#5. 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

#6. Sometimes you have to walk through the fire, in order to reach your calling.

Shannon L. Alder

#7. Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

Edward Abbey

#8. In science, you really do need to have a purpose-driven life. You will succeed to the extent that you get the most out of your career so that you can give the most back. Try to be an addict, driven to achieve discoveries, learning new things, and then writing about them.

E. O. Wilson

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. A writer who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own lustre.

Samuel Johnson

#12. I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.

Theodora Goss

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I write, because not breathing is not an option.

Monice Mitchell Simms

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. The purpose of a writer is to show the beauty and tragedy of life in the reader's own mirror.

Debasish Mridha

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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