Top 100 Quotes About The Act Of Writing
#1. I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.
James Lipton
#2. With drawing, I am acutely aware of creating something on a sheet of paper. It is a sensual act, which you cannot say about the act of writing. In fact, I often turn to drawing to recover from the writing.
Gunter Grass
#3. The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one's earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?
Helen Humphreys
#4. I won't say that writing is therapy, but for me, the act of writing is therapy. The ability to be productive is good for my mental health. It's always better for me to be writing than vegetating on some couch.
Raymond E. Feist
#5. The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race.
Henry Louis Gates
#6. A writer's life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure's bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ... Except the act of writing.
E.L. Doctorow
#7. Literature, the act of writing, affirms life, however dark the story it tells.
Marty Rubin
#8. You can't really discover the most interesting conflicts and problems in a subject until you've tried to write about them. At that point, one discovers discontinuities in the data, perhaps, or in one's own thinking; then the act of writing forces you to work harder to resolve these contradictions.
Anthony F. C. Wallace
#9. However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#10. Romanticizing the act of writing or any other art is not very helpful to the artist or the art. It's much better if one simply does.
Anne Roiphe
#11. The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
Edward Albee
#12. Writing is not magic. It's a craft, a process, a set of steps. As with any process, things sometimes break down. Even in a good story, the writer runs into problems. So the act of writing always includes problem solving.
Roy Peter Clark
#13. The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation.
Stephen King
#14. Henry James joyously engaged in the act of writing. A good day's writing gave him a sense of strength, of control over chaos, a victory of order and clarity over the confused battle of existence.
Leon Edel
#15. I read what I'd written and thought once again: from what violent chasms is my most intimate intimacy nourished, why does it deny itself so much and flee to the domain of ideas? I feel within me a subterranean violence, a violence that only comes to the surface during the act of writing.
Clarice Lispector
#16. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary when nothing happens.
Kobo Abe
#17. Thought the mind can justify itself faster than the speed of light, it can be stopped through the act of writing.
Byron Katie
#18. I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.
Kim Edwards
#19. ...one of the main purposes of our assesment is to find evidence of the children using these ideas to make decisions about their writing work each day, catching them in the act [of writing].
Katie Wood Ray
#20. The act of writing ... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.
Jodi Picoult
#21. I'm a writer, and the subject is less important than the act of writing itself.
Jess Walter
#22. A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.
William Zinsser
#23. The act of writing is a kind of catharsis, a liberation, but I never really concerned myself with that. I write because it interests me.
Nathalie Sarraute
#24. The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.
Jean Malaquais
#25. Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.
Rob Bignell, Editor
#26. For some reason, the act of writing them down makes me remember. Each word I write brings me closer to finding the right one.
Ally Condie
#27. Inspiration comes from the act of writing.
Steve Doll
#28. I write because the act of writing itself is what drives me. It's a private communication within myself - nothing more or less. This doesn't mean I do not want to share with people.
Michael Hersch
#29. The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it's almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject.
Pankaj Mishra
#30. The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
David Hare
#31. The act of writing itself isn't outrageous. And the institution subtly and insidiously works on you in such a way that though you seem to have freedom you become a servant. Your main issue is to get promoted to the next thing. Or get invited to a picnic. Or get tenure. Or get laid.
Gerald Stern
#32. Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write ... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.
Clive James
#33. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
#34. To me, the act of writing itself is infinitely more important than any success I have achieved through it. Not that I'm knocking success, but after all, I'm the person locked in front of my TRS 80 anywhere from eight to twelve hours a day.
Jacqueline Briskin
#35. The act of writing if one is conscious of legibility is a wonderful discipline. Our minds, which roil like captured oceans, are forced to order themselves and to send coherent messages through our fingers...writing is like yoga or Thai Chi; it forces our bodies to obey our minds.
Edward St Paige
#36. The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.
Ralph Ellison
#37. The act of writing anything can be as much consent as creation.
Charles Baxter
#38. Language is inexorably tied to power and understanding. And power and understanding are the roots of magic. Just the act of writing something down is a magical act.
Patrick Rothfuss
#39. In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.
Jose Saramago
#40. The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
Natalie Goldberg
#41. The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.
Harlan Ellison
#42. So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.
Kobo Abe
#43. But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject.
Philip Gerard
#44. I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.
Joyce Maynard
#45. Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
Timothy Schaffert
#46. The act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even re-writing's fun. You're getting somewhere, whether it seems to move or not.
James Thurber
#47. I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.
Denise Duhamel
#48. Inspiration does not always precede the act of writing; it often follows it.
Madeleine L'Engle
#49. During the act of writing I have told myself something that I didn't know I knew.
Gail Godwin
#50. I would say that writing, both the act of writing, and of course reading of other people's work is, for me, supreme joy.
James Lipton
#51. What I didn't realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad's old fountain pen wasn't really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.
Stephen King
#52. The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.
Chuck Palahniuk
#53. Paradoxically, the most constructive thing women can dois to write, for in the act of writing we deny our mutedness and beginto eliminate some of the difficulties that have been put upon us.
Dale Spender
#54. 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
#55. I tend to delay writing by doing more research - it's really the act of writing the piece that I have the hardest time with.
James Surowiecki
#56. Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.
Anne Waldman
#57. Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
Stephen King
#58. Writing is such lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up. If something strikes me as funny in the act of writing, I throw it in just to amuse myself. If I think it's funny I assume a few other people will find it funny, and that seems to me to be a good day's work.
William Zinsser
#59. The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words ... and then you start to create a work of art, and that's another miracle, and it remains mysterious to the writer, or to this writer anyway.
Janette Turner Hospital
#60. Lectio divina provides us with a discipline, developed and handed down by our ancestors, for recovering the context, restoring the intricate
web of relationships to which the Scriptures give witness but that are so easily lost or obscured in the act of writing.
Eugene H. Peterson
#61. Success means being heard and don't stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard. You may write for the joy of it, but the act of writing is not complete in itself. It has to end in its audience.
Flannery O'Connor
#63. Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.
J.R. Moehringer
#64. Write every day. Don't ever stop. If you are unpublished, enjoy the act of writing - and if you are published, keep enjoying the act of writing. Don't become self-satisfied, don't stop moving ahead, growing, making it new. The stakes are high. Why else would we write?
Rick Bass
#65. I used to think there was something dirty about being paid for something which is a sacred thing to do. I can't disconnect the act of writing music from the act of prayer. If anyone tries to stop me working, it feels like someone is trying to stop me from taking communion.
John Tavener
#66. The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
Betsy Lerner
#67. The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.
Elie Wiesel
#68. For the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he begins.
Plato
#69. Essential acts to master for self realisation;
Master the act of learning.
Master the act of writing.
Master the act of reading.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#70. With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.
Roberto Bolano
#71. One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.
E.L. Doctorow
#72. I've found you can go on writing in the dark, and that the act of writing itself, that mysterious, dangerous, intoxicating, absorbing, nourishing magician's trick, that act of creation is its own light.
Janette Turner Hospital
#73. I've always subscribed to the notion that a writer always has something else to say, and the more you write, the more you have to write about, because the act of writing is self-generating.
Kate Christensen
#74. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn't without that pen in your hand. It's a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words - but only when you're writing. You can't do it in your head.
Paul Auster
#75. I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.
Brian Helgeland
#76. Observing people. A spark of idea for a story sometimes comes from the simple act of observation.
Ika Natassa
#77. I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Toni Morrison
#78. Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
Ben H. Winters
#79. Writing is the act of finding out what I think.
Stephen King
#80. Increase the number of adventures you act on and you'll lighten the weight of regret.
Gina Greenlee
#81. In a way, writing is an incredible act of individualism, producing your language, and yet to use it from the heart of a crowd as opposed to as an individual performance is a conflicting thing. I do stand alone, and yet it's not about being an individual or being ambitious.
Arundhati Roy
#82. The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write; and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow Wilson
#83. To present a whole world that doesn't exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we're polymaths. That's just the act of all good writing.
William Gibson
#84. Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.
Natalie Goldberg
#85. It's funny to think about the uncanny reflexively, as an author who is perhaps gradually becoming aware of my own hidden secrets. Accessing that shadowy territory really requires the physical act of writing.
Karen Russell
#86. Writing ... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.
Margaret Atwood
#87. Writing is an act of discovery in which you peel back the layers of the story as you write it down.
Matt Forbeck
#88. I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure.
Fleur Adcock
#89. Writing is my drug of choice. Everyday, I write. It eases out the pressure in my head and it all lands on a blank piece of paper. It has its own healing power and it gives me a feeling of contentment. Very addictive, yet it is not a criminal act.
Sonnia Kemmer
#90. I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.
Sam Shepard
#91. One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.
Justin Cronin
#92. Use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of a sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage.
Chuck Wendig
#93. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
M.V. Carey
#94. ...because writing is fundamentally an act of reaching out from self to other. It is a reminder that we are not alone in the universe, that we have comrades on our journey through life.
Alicia Rasley
#95. What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
#96. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood
Katherine Imogene Youngblood
#97. Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie
#98. He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
Charles Baudelaire
#99. The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.
Cynthia Ogren
#100. I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain.
Oscar Wilde
