Top 99 Quotes About The Art Of Writing
#1. Art Gropes. It stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself, waiting to pounce.
John Gardner
#2. It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
Isadora Duncan
#3. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#4. Timid young artists, adding parental fears to their own, often give up their sunny dreams of artistic careers, settling into the twilight world of could-have-beens and regrets.
Julia Cameron
#5. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Brian Raif
#6. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#7. The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it.
Stephen Koch
#8. I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.
Maya Angelou
#10. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#11. Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.
Christopher Morley
#12. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
#13. The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business - all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).
Daniel J. Levitin
#14. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
#15. Every separate sector of artistic creation has its own basic rules ... data which govern it. They are contained in the textbooks on these subjects. A professional knows the rules of the game as a matter of course so that he can achieve, in the upper strata above that, a high quality of art.
L. Ron Hubbard
#16. A lot of young girls don't realise how diverse the career opportunities are in games development. Many think that you need elite math skills and a vast knowledge of all things tech to work in games, and haven't thought about avenues like design, producing, art, writing or composing.
Rhianna Pratchett
#17. The Hank Williams Syndrome: Come to Nashville, write some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of a sudden die.
Waylon Jennings
#18. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#19. The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.
Alan Sillitoe
#20. 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
#21. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#22. "Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
Harriet Monroe
#23. Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
Ren Garcia
#24. The writing of headline is one of the great journalistic arts. They either conceal or reveal am interest
Claude C. Hopkins
#25. The art of writing, like the art of love, runs all the way from a kind of routine hard to distinguish from piling bricks to a kind of frenzy closely related to delirium tremens.
H.L. Mencken
#26. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#27. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#28. Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.
James Lee Burke
#29. The artist cannot hold back; it is impossible, because writing, or any other discipline of art, involves participation in suffering, in the ills and the occasional stabbing joys that come from being part of the human drama.
Madeleine L'Engle
#30. The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.
Steven Pressfield
#31. All art, be it writing, painting, film, dance, whatever, is a manipulation of time and space. It's an interpretation and a recreation of the facts, using various artifacts that point us in the direction of our personal truths.
Elisa Lorello
#32. Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.
Philip Gerard
#33. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
Sophie Calle
#34. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
Per Brinch Hansen
#35. DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
#37. 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
#38. I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.
Mahatma Gandhi
#39. I like writing letters and receiving letters. It's a shame that we've lost the art of letter-writing and saving correspondence. I mourn that.
Elizabeth McGovern
#40. Much of my writing has taken the form of a pilgrimage: to sacred places that represent the best of America, to musicians and other artists who represent the best of their art.
William Zinsser
#41. The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.
Italo Calvino
#42. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.
Annie Dillard
#43. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
#44. Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.
Elizabeth George
#45. There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.
Jim Davis
#46. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
Umberto Eco
#47. Writing, like any art, is a continuing process of discovering the infinite possibilities of Life.
Hubert Selby Jr.
#48. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
Mary Heaton Vorse
#50. One of the great things about art is you get to see what your concerns are, what those things tumbling around inside you are.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#51. The artist committing himself to his calling has volunteered for hell, whether he knows it or not. He will be dining for the duration on a diet of isolation, rejection, self-doubt, despair, ridicule, contempt, and humiliation.
Steven Pressfield
#52. More and more in the art world are becoming moralistic, telling artists and critics what they should and shouldn't write, do, or make art about. Never mind the intellectual hypocrisy of this: Those who violate the clublike code are made out to be wrong, immoral, corrupt.
Jerry Saltz
#53. 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
#54. We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff.'
Michael Morpurgo
#55. But perhaps it is always so, that men form their conceptions from fictitious, conventional types, and then - all the combinations made - they are tired of the fictitious figures and begin to invent more natural, true figures.
Leo Tolstoy
#56. Writing, more than any other art, is indexed to the worthiness of the self because it is identified in people's minds with emotion.
Rachel Cusk
#57. Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
David Hare
#58. NEXT LIFE. My embroidery studio on the main street of Bayeux will be just one part of my Institute of Slow Information. I will also teach letter writing, listening, miniature portrait painting, and the art of doing one thing at a time.
Vivian Swift
#59. Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an inner experience.
Paul Theroux
#60. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts-music, painting and writing-is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.
William S. Burroughs
#61. For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#62. The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
Joyce Carol Oates
#63. Film is the ultimate canvas, the elixir of art, and the magic of life.
A.D. Posey
#65. Our day-to-day lives are pretty chaotic. So in terms of the writing part, you have to get pretty disciplined about finding quiet moments and making sure you're making time for the art side, on top of all the time-consuming business side.
Sarah Kay
#66. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
Harley King
#67. But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
Charles Nodier
#68. The ironic, too-cool meta satire, the sneering and mocking? Is actually just a contemporary version of the bourgeois sentimentality it's trying to mock. It is not new. Really it's almost quaint. The backlash has already outlasted it.
Tony Tulathimutte
#69. The real self of an artiste lies in art, so when an artiste performs, all the pain, trauma and tension get released through art, be it dancing, painting, singing, writing or even martial arts.
Mrinalini Sarabhai
#70. It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention.
Ted Dekker
#71. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#72. I'd like to rid myself of writing, to surrender, to release the venom. And hopefully at some point, I'll be a happy, well-adjusted guy and I'll have no need for all that 'art.'
Henry Rollins
#73. Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
James McNeill Whistler
#74. I think the business of music has really taken a huge hit. There's no doubt about it. But an artist is always going to produce their art, their music. They're going to paint, they're going to write.
Gloria Estefan
#75. A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#76. If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it ... for me, every act of art is the act of solving a mystery.
Truman Capote
#77. Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement - the art of living.
H.E. Davey
#78. That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
Haruki Murakami
#79. For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is.
Mick Garris
#80. The thing we often forget to talk about, or perhaps we take for granted, is our country's dazzling beauty. Our natural environment is so much a part of Australia's art, writing, music and culture, both indigenous and non indigenous.
Quentin Bryce
#81. There's no way the writing staff of 'Game of Thrones' haven't read 'The Art of War.' There's definitely an influence on 'Game of Thrones' from this book in both a general way and on the character of Lord Baelish and his strategies.
Aidan Gillen
#82. The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
Natasha Trethewey
#83. The habits of craft, developed day in and day out over a working lifetime, create moments of astonishment, sublime and magical effects, precisely because the writer is not thinking overtly about making art.
Philip Gerard
#84. The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship
Kinky Friedman
#85. What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.
Edward Abbey
#86. Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum
#89. The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
Annie Dillard
#90. The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
Danielle M. Maistry
#91. Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
Khaled Hosseini
#92. Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word.
Cathryn Louis
#93. True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.
Arthur Rimbaud
#94. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing ... is discovering.
Robert Frost
#95. We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.
Susan Sontag
#96. But this graveyard of dead books doesn't unnerve me. It reminds me that I had a deeper motive, one that only the approach of old age and death has unlocked. I wrote to answer questions I had - the motive of all art, whatever its ostensible subject. There were things I urgently needed to know.
James Atlas
#97. Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.
Rebecca Solnit
#98. It's been noted that writing about the production of art is a masquerade or metaphor for writing about writing. This may be true, there are similarities - both the verbal and the visual represent the thing or the concept.
Sarah Hall
#99. There's a kind of perverseness or betrayal in that idea that art is somehow superior to life. Or that it's more important to write well than it is to take out the garbage.
Matthew Specktor
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
