Top 100 Writing Art Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.
Kami Garcia
#3. There's a difference between the 'art' of writing and the 'craft' of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.
Gerard De Marigny
#4. Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better.
Catie Curtis
#5. If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life
whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours.
Don Roff
#6. Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.
Eileen Myles
#7. Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul.
Robert McKee
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
Jenny Offill
#11. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#12. 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
#13. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#14. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Brian Raif
#15. I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.
Mark Nepo
#16. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#17. In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.
Jorge Luis Borges
#18. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.
Michelle Phan
#19. 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
#20. One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
Sara Sheridan
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Writing is a performance art for me. They're very closely aligned, writing and performing. But I'm a writer, not a performer.
Clive James
#27. 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
#28. 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
#30. Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.
E.L. Konigsburg
#32. The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.
Cynthia Ozick
#34. 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
#35. The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
Mary E. Pearson
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.
Alan Sillitoe
#42. 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
#43. Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#44. "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
#45. Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you
Ginnetta Correli
#46. God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though
and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.
David Foster Wallace
#47. It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
#48. I don't like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter , finally , because I do both things anyway . Everybody's dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best . I feel as much a unity , as much comradeship , with painters as I do writers .
Clive Barker
#49. Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
Ren Garcia
#50. Characters last. Beautiful writing lasts. A compelling narrative lasts. Art survives long after ideas go extinct ...
Joel Achenbach
#51. By encouraging the critic in themselves (the hater) they have killed the artist (the lover).
Brenda Ueland
#52. I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.
Patricia Robin Woodruff
#53. The trouble began with Forster. After him it was considered ungentlemanly to write more than five or six novels.
Anthony Burgess
#54. I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.
Sarah Brightman
#55. The writing of headline is one of the great journalistic arts. They either conceal or reveal am interest
Claude C. Hopkins
#56. I'm trying to get every man involved in art, into experimental music, or painting, or novel-writing.
Harvey Pekar
#57. I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#58. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#59. Theatre was an art form that I didn't really respect, and because I wanted to shake it up and do different things on stage, I was able to combine all the things I'd learnt through writing on my own.
Martin McDonagh
#60. 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
#61. Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
#62. It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
Robert E. Howard
#66. A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'
Dennis Christopher
#67. Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.
Cyril Connolly
#68. The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.
Blaise Pascal
#69. 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
#70. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#71. Storytelling is a gift, but writing is a learned art.
Beem Weeks
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.
Philip Gerard
#76. For me, writing isn't about money and fame. It's about passion, an art form that I want to share with the world, expand the horizons to new worlds, new experiences, and new adventures.
Jason W. Blair
#77. I think all writing about art is in some way dancing to architecture. It's all about similitude, being analogous, metaphorical, adjectival, etc.
Rob Chapman
#78. Writing is a kind of performing art, and I can't sit down to write unless I'm dressed. I don't mean dressed in a suit, but dressed well and comfortably and I have to be shaved and bathed.
Peter O'Toole
#79. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.
Gretel Ehrlich
#80. My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn't have that 'writing is everything, my art is all.' You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.
Kate Atkinson
#81. The best thing about Art is that the people who create it live forever.
Jonathan Heatt
#82. I've always felt writing is an art. Publishing is a business. I felt strongly if I was going to write, I would write what I wanted to, and if the 'market' didn't respond, there was nothing I could really do about it.
M.J. Rose
#83. 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
#84. Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable
Per Brinch Hansen
#85. 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
#87. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#91. On pristine parchment I draw with my skis calligraphic lines of joy, writing poems of movement.
Patricia Robin Woodruff
#92. In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.
Ray Bradbury
#93. 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
#94. Artists don't often know much about writing ... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.
Matthew Collings
#96. Not only is writing more important than ever, but visual literacy is vital. We don't teach enough design, art, visual things. We have to recognize what we're seeing. It matters if you send someone a cluttered design. It matters more than ever.
Marissa Moss
#97. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#98. 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
#99. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
