Top 100 Writing As An Art Form Quotes
#1. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level ... A writer is someone who writes.
Pat Schneider
#2. I love experimental writing, when it's good, and good examples are much more likely to be found in the short form.
Nicholas Royle
#3. The assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.
John Scalzi
#4. Writing is a form of licensed madness.
Mal Peet
#5. For me,the Bild-Dichtung [image-poem] is the ideal form,because the drawing process is constantly being interrupted or contrasted by the writing. And since I always have something to say when I am writing,the effort has a balancing effect. Drawing and writing are wonderful complements.
Gunter Brus
#6. Sometimes ... the short short appears to rest on nothing more than a fragile anecdote which the writer has managed to drape with a quantity of suggestion. A single incident, a mere anecdote - these form the spine of the short short.
Irving Howe
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story.
Katherine Anne Porter
#10. the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Stanley Fish
#11. It often happens that things come into the mind in a more finished form than could have been achieved after much study.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#13. Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.
Ian Hickson
#14. You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.
Jason Robert Brown
#15. Writing mysteries lets me get away with murder. I think 'the mystery' may be the greatest form for social criticism, simply because it is pedestrian.
Gregory McDonald
#16. ... if you can't be happy then be quiet!" frm "Silent Joe," by T Jefferson Parker." Silence is another form of lying." frm "Attachment," by me. Take your pick ... words, "writing freezes speech," Chris Hedges. "Writing is thinking," me.
Mark Jabbour
#17. I am always thinking about writing music; my wife is constantly asking me: 'Is there any way you can turn off the music part of your brain for a minute?' but I really can't! It's my form of therapy.
Kellin Quinn
#18. 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
#19. I started playing piano when I was 6. And I knew that wanted to be involved in that form of expression, whether it was through music, or acting, or dancing, or painting, or writing.
Alanis Morissette
#20. In creation myths, a god shapes mud or clay into living form, much like a potter throws a pot or a sculptor reveals the statue within a block of marble. But a writer has to create his own clay or stone before he can begin shaping life from it.
Stuart Dybek
#21. Energy is a being yet is not. For it to materialise it must be pure thus it turns into a crystal like form.
That is the true being of the Elders and the Three Immortal Blades.
And your body has been cursed with it.
Max Jacket- The Three Immortal Blades
Kia Carrington-Russell
#22. The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.
Julian Barnes
#23. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#24. The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song.
Gene Clark
#25. Rock 'n' roll is an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock 'n' roll, or a movie can be rock 'n' roll. It's a way of living your life.
Lester Bangs
#26. 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
#27. In the fall of 1989, I was writing 600-word columns at the 'Herald.' My heart always was in long-form narrative writing, though. It's what I cut my teeth on at the 'Boston Phoenix.'
Charlie Pierce
#28. To be honest, writing comics is a dream come true - the form is unparalleled and is home to some of the most original and innovative storytelling around.
Adam Christopher
#29. For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.
Wallace Shawn
#30. Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.
Ernst Pawel
#31. My great joy is to give form to reality. Music is a great release, a great enjoyment to me. Eventually I'd like to write something of great importance. That's my ambition-to write something worthwhile.
Jim Morrison
#32. You have to have an eye and a feeling for where things go. Writing visually, writing textually, writing sonically. Text is visual for me and images are textual. There is power in the way ideas are arranged, not just developed rhetorically. Form is everything.
Masha Tupitsyn
#33. Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.
Lemony Snicket
#34. Writing this, I'm reminded that until I was quite old I too adhered to the romantic cult of madness. I got over it, thank God. Experience has taught me that this particular form of romanticism is pure stupidity, and that madness is the saddest, most dismal thing on earth.
Emmanuel Carrere
#35. 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
#36. When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things - as opposed to making things up - that did not quite happen.
Geoff Dyer
#37. The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
Sherman Alexie
#38. Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.
John Berger
#39. 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
#40. You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.
Ngaio Marsh
#41. Reading is the most rewarding form of exile and the most necessary discipline for novelists who burn with the ambition to get better.
Pat Conroy
#42. I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
Alan Lightman
#43. No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers..
Himmilicious
#44. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
#45. Writing is a unique art-form. You are painting a detailed image in someone's mind, and it will be different for every single reader.
Giuseppe Bianco
#46. A sense of mission lost
in ink's
jagged outcrops.
I was trying to tell myself
what I must have known
before
in a form
I wouldn't recognize at first.
Rae Armantrout
#47. My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.
Roger Zelazny
#48. Somewhere in university, I realized that I hadn't been to classes in months, and I'd get tired to the point of narcolepsy doing anything other than some form of performing, directing, writing, or acting.
William Shatner
#49. Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.
Pat Schneider
#50. Writing is the thing that sustains me and keeps me going. It is a form of self-preservation for me.
Bei Dao
#51. Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
Pat Conroy
#52. You have to attempt to find new forms that will force you to write freshly and better and hopefully more truthfully.
Richard Flanagan
#53. What I'm trying to do right now is truly answer my most deepest most unarticulated questions for myself through my writing in some form.
Karan Bajaj
#54. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
#55. I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
Bruce Coville
#56. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
Rollo May
#57. When I write songs I write for myself ... I'm writing it as a form of expression, and hoping to find an audience, an audience that responds to music that is honest and lyrical and tells stories.
Patti Scialfa
#59. Perfume is a form of writing, an ink, a choice made in the first person, the dot on the i, a weapon, a courteous gesture, part of the instant, a consequence.
Serge Lutens
#60. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.
Harold Innis
#61. The sign is determined at the moment I use it and for the object of which it must form a part. For this reason I cannot determine in advance signs which never change, and which would be like writing: that would paralyze the freedom of my invention.
Henri Matisse
#62. Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Ian McEwan
#63. Writing is a channeling of an individual experience; so is reading. That's what's so exciting about this art form - it's interactive.
T.C. Boyle
#65. Writing is something I should have done more of, it's a form of coming home.
Amanda Harlech
#66. 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
#67. You can't write any form of fiction unless you enjoy reading it. You must be sincere in your approach. It's no good despising the form. So many people think they could earn some money from writing something for which they have no affection. It won't work. The first thing you have to have is belief.
Charlotte Bingham
#68. When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.
Sylvia Plath
#69. Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life.
Neil Simon
#70. As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.
Dwight Yoakam
#71. Writing is the one art form that really should allow you to hang yourself.
Peter Sotos
#72. Take the whole range of imaginative literature, and we are all wholesale borrowers. In every matter that relates to invention, to use, or beauty or form, we are borrowers.
Wendell Phillips
#73. he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot.
Duncan Wu
#74. Writing is a very focused form of meditation. Just as good as sitting in a lotus position.
Alan Moore
#75. Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.'
Monica Ali
#76. The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
#77. The trip changed all that. Stirring the murk of a life ill-fitting, Something More was perceptible though without name or form. Something More was the genesis of a map, not one handed to me but rendered with each step taken, a skill seasoned by a cruise gone bad.
Gina Greenlee
#78. A lot of writing is a form of seeing - putting down what you see in terms of action and landscape.
Jonathan Ames
#79. I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
Maya Lin
#80. I love and enjoy writing.
Writing is a form of daily communication.
It a communication to higher divine power.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#81. 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
#82. Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry.
Diane Ackerman
#83. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
Kevin Barry
#85. Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.
Tom Wolfe
#86. Over the years, I had something in principle against autobiographical writing altogether because memory plays tricks on us, and we also tend to reinvent ourselves. But there comes an age when one begins to observe life, and there are things that need time to mature, also in terms of literary form.
Gunter Grass
#87. Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.
Matthea Harvey
#88. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
#89. Screenplays are not writing. They're a fake form of writing. It's a lot of dialogue and very little atmosphere. Very little description. Very little character work. It's very dangerous. You'll never learn to write.
Ray Bradbury
#90. At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.
Nic Pizzolatto
#91. To me, the most perfect screenplay ever written will be one word, when you finally reduce it down to that. Until then, writing will be an imperfect form of communication.
Sylvester Stallone
#92. Facts seemed to run around and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern.
Philip Zaleski
#93. I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
Will Self
#94. To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#95. Artistry is the dance of color & form, whether visual, musical, or sparked in the imagination by the written word.
Cathryn Louis
#96. More than this, I believe that the only lastingly important form of writing is writing for children. It is writing that is carried in the reader's heart for a lifetime; it is writing that speaks to the future.
Sonya Hartnett
#97. I carry around a little journal with me, a little notebook and a pen and just write all the time. Not necessarily actually sitting down and writing lyrics, just free-form writing, whatever's going on in my mind.
Mandy Moore
#98. Its highest point was The Worst Journey in the World. Then you see this decline, and this harking back, using the 19th-century form when we're not in the 19th century. That way of writing a book about the world out there - you just can't do it anymore.
Robyn Davidson
#99. Some people may be more gifted than others, but excellence in writing, as in any art form or craft, involves discipline and practice.
James B. Stewart
#100. Writing is a lifelong disease.
Once contracted, the only prescription is to write constantly in whatever form to express your condition, in whatever construction to carry your words beyond you.
J.R. Tompkins
