Top 100 Writing As Art Quotes
#1. Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you're an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you're not an artist, at least you can do a good day's work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#2. Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Paddy Chayefsky
#3. As I had collaborated with visual artists before whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works and as I had taught for a time in art colleges the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien.
Gavin Bryars
#4. As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night.
Daniel J. Rice
#5. Drawing and painting is like a quickie in bed. Were as novel writing is a long term relationship, much more fulling.
Tara Dobbs
#6. In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.
Meg Cabot
#7. You know how writers are ... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
Orson Scott Card
#8. Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#9. Songwriting as an art is a bit archaic now. Just writing a song is not good enough.
David Bowie
#10. The first duty of an Author is
I conceive
a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature; his second, such a conscientious study of Art as shall enable him to interpret eloquently and effectively the oracles delivered by those two great deities.
Charlotte Bronte
Juliet Barker
#11. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
George Henry Lewes
#12. Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.
Art Buchwald
#13. A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.
Jhene Aiko
#14. It's surprising that readers don't see challenging writing as morally hazardous, when it might be pushing the same kinds of boundaries as art does.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#15. For first you write a sentence, And then you chop it small; Then mix the bits and sort them out Just as they chance to fall: The order of the phrases makes no difference at all.
Lewis Carroll
#16. I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.
Dana Spiotta
#17. I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.
Tristan Tzara
#18. New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.
Jen Pollock Michel
#19. As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.
Andrea Hirata
#20. My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.
Laurence Housman
#21. Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it's not completely an art form. In painting you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick or whatever. In sculpture you can get a rock. Writing you just need a pencil and paper.
Forest Whitaker
#22. Writers should find out where joy resides and give it a voice. Every bright word or picture is a piece of pleasure set afloat. The reader catches it, and he goes on his way rejoicing. It's the business of art to send him that way as often as possible.
Nancy Horan
#23. Writing as an art form belongs to all people, regardless of economic class or educational level ... A writer is someone who writes.
Pat Schneider
#24. In the act of creation, as in all the arts, the soul should be felt in the face and the fingers and the tongue, even in the cavities.
Chris Campanioni
#25. Art is the last thing I'm worried about when I'm writing a song. As far as I'm concerned, art is just short for 'Arthur.'
Keith Richards
#26. Visual art and writing don't exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can't do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.
William S. Burroughs
#27. There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
Isaac D'Israeli
#28. The art of writing is the same as the art of convincing a teacher that you really did do your homework or you studied something that you didn't. It's the art of lying convincingly and it's amazing how much you can learn from a little.
Neil Gaiman
#29. 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
#30. An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.
Joanna Russ
#31. As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.
Christina Westover
#32. First, you write for yourself... always, to make sense of experience and the world around you. It's one of the ways I stay sane. Our stories, our books, our films are how we cope with the random trauma-inducing chaos of life as it plays.
Bruce Springsteen
#33. For the writer that has truly suffered, their pen, their words, their art will become as important as breathing.
Jason E. Hodges
#34. Although the primitive in art may be both interesting and impressive, as portrayed in American fiction it is conspicuous for dullness alone. Drab persons living drab lives, observed by drab minds and reported in drab writing ...
Ellen Glasgow
#35. Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.
Walter Darby Bannard
#36. I'm awake as soon as the sun crests the eastern hills. I guess I'm motivated because I love just about everything about my life - the writing, the many critters, the art, and all the rest.
Linda Lael Miller
#37. Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.
Lynne Truss
#38. The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing ... should be taught to every child just as writing is.
John Ruskin
#39. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
Alexander Pope
#40. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
Joyce Carol Oates
#41. To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.
Cate Marvin
#42. The art of writing involves making as many cups of tea as you can in the time available for writing. Then adding extra time for writing ...
Alan Dapre
#43. I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Toni Morrison
#44. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
#45. The true artist plays mad with his soul, labors at the very lip of the volcano, but remembers and clings to his purpose, which is as strong as the dream. He is not someone possessed, like Cassandra, but a passionate, easily tempted explorer who fully intends to get home again, like Odysseus.
John Gardner
#46. When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#47. Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.
Robin Black
#48. There are times when quantity is at least as important as quality in learning an art.
Lawrence Watt-Evans
#49. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, I read, therefore it writes.
Italo Calvino
#50. In my opinion, works of art should be viewed as gifts; something precious given from a point of empathy, where personal enrichment is vastly superior to the value of the gift, and the giver begs for nothing but for the gift to shine on its own.
Kevin Focke
#51. I do feel like animated films really combine a lot of different of art forms: film-making and writing and drawing and painting - to a certain extent, even sculpting. It's a wonderful medium to work with as a craftsman because it's such so rich and so varied and so expressive.
John Musker
#52. 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
#53. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
#54. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.
James Arthur
#55. All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
Sean Hinn
#56. If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you've got. Just don't plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living.
Seth Godin
#57. I have a preference for writing that deals with domestic issues; even in visual art, I like work that focuses on very small aspects of human life. I like movies that have a very narrow focus. I can see how it might be viewed as limiting, but I don't experience it that way.
Carol Windley
#58. Rather than feeling that every moment you've got to exert this enormous control, you can take the attitude that your job as a writer is not to control everything, but to set things in motion.
Stuart Dybek
#59. In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
N.K. Jemisin
#60. There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.
Andrew Solomon
#61. Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
#62. Artists don't often know much about writing ... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.
Matthew Collings
#63. 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
#64. You must write as if Dostoyevsky himself will be reading your novel, and Shakespeare will be acting it out.
Christina Westover
#65. 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
#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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. "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
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.
Simon Schama
#76. 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
#77. (Francis) Bacon's best known writings are his essays. They are loved for many reasons, such as their being so short.
Richard Armour
#78. I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he ... Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.
Harold Bloom
#79. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
#80. The recent extraordinary discovery in Photography, as applied in the operations of the mind, has reduced the art of novel-writing to the merest mechanical labour.
Lewis Carroll
#81. I like looking back at art-work or my writing and seeing it in a different perspective...It shows how much one has grown as a creator. Perfection may not exist in reality but I always strive to capture the beauty in whatever I happen to be doing.
Alexander Lloyd Curran
#82. I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.
Neil Patrick Harris
#83. The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching.
Maurice Blanchot
#84. Writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.
Stephen King
#85. Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.
Raymond Chandler
#86. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
#87. I'm sorry that our country and the people do not consider the arts as vital to our well-being as, say, medicine. Suffering is unnecessary. It doesn't make you a better artist; it only makes you a hungry one. However, to me the acquisition of the craft of writing was worth any amount of suffering.
Rita Mae Brown
#88. I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction.
Tom Robbins
#89. As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?
Stephen King
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. All art began as sacred art, you know? I mean, all painting began as religious painting. All writing began as religious writing.
Salman Rushdie
#94. The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship
Kinky Friedman
#95. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.
Cristian Mihai
#96. 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
#97. I figure whatever I choose to create, I'll be neglecting somebody - so my art may as well make me happy. - Audrey Niffenegger
Jen Campbell
#98. Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.
George Carlin
#99. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#100. Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.
Azar Nafisi
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