Writing Human Nature Quotes

#1. Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization.

Abraham Maslow

#2. Nobody wants to be a part of your story. Everybody wants you to elaborate on their fantasies.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#3. Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

Damon Galgut

#4. The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.

Northrop Frye

#5. I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

Joyce Carol Oates

#6. The personal eloquence of other people expressing aspects of nature and human condition inspire us, as do persons whom exhibit courage to gain strength when dealing with the hardships and struggles of a mortal life.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#7. I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.

Ann Patchett

#8. Most stories are not about people
but about life, an addiction like the rest of them
that destroys you even as you love it,
but you love it anyway and can never get enough.

Michael Hogan

#9. It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Geraldine Brooks

#10. Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Ted Chiang

#11. I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature ... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.

Ellen Glasgow

#12. (On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.

Anthony Trollope

#13. Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.

Lewis Thomas

#14. I am Envy ... I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Christopher Marlowe

#15. An anti-hero is just a villain you spend a lot of time with.

Matthew Catania

#16. When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

Geraldine Brooks

#17. Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings.

David Ives

#18. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.

Roger Ebert

#19. What I hope my writing reflects ... is a sense of the connections between all human beings ... and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.

Chris Crutcher

#20. If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.

Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#21. According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.

Melina Marchetta

#22. Look in the heart and write ... The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life!

Antonin Sertillanges

#23. If you record the world honestly, there's no way people can stop being funny. A lot of fiction writing doesn't get that idea, as if to acknowledge it would trivialize the story or trivialize human nature, when in fact human nature is reduced and falsified if the comic aspects are not included.

Lorrie Moore

#24. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

Charles Bukowski

#25. Your past experiences will flavour your future ones, that is human nature.

Deborah Cater

#26. Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#27. Truthfully, there're only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won't care if you're happy, only if you're miserable like they are. They eat that shit up.

Crystal Woods

#28. If you are going to write, write about human nature. That is the only thing that doesn't date.

William Faulkner

#29. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

Milan Kundera

#30. You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.

Joss Whedon

#31. Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.

Peter Kreeft

#32. That's something that seems to happen when I'm writing, where maybe things that don't necessarily make a lot of logical sense are put together, and yet we struggle to make sense of these things somehow. I'm not quite sure why that is; it's something about human nature, I guess.

Kurt Wagner

#33. The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.

Bankei Yotaku