Top 97 Writing In Nature Quotes
#1. I make no apology for writing in nature's age-old and unaging language, of whose images we build our paradises, Broceliande and Brindavan, the Forest of Arden, Xanadu, Shelley's Skies, or even Wordsworth's Grasemere, which can be found on no map.
Kathleen Raine
#2. I'm likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.
Fennel Hudson
#3. 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
#4. I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
Per Petterson
#5. To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
Steve Almond
#6. Books , like landscapes, leave their marks in us. ( ... ) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.
Robert Macfarlane
#7. For me, writing something in the spirit of Halloween is like Mother Teresa writing on charity and sacrifice. It's just second nature to me.
Danny Elfman
#8. You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature.
Paul Lauterbur
#9. Carrying the need to bow down and seek solace at the altar of nature, he had launched the canoe in the darkness. Tonight, his altar was the Alapaha River.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#10. After a summer trip to Switzerland, which was rich in experiences, I started writing. In the beginning, I aimed at descriptions of nature and folk life until, as the years passed, the description of man became my chief interest.
Henrik Pontoppidan
#11. New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.
Samuel Johnson
#12. I am extremely happy walking on the downs...I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
Virginia Woolf
#13. At this moment, the story in his head was perfect. He also knew from experience that it would degenerate the second he started typing, because such was the nature of writing.
Sara Gruen
#14. I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book - my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me - and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition upon modesty.
Max Ehrmann
#15. In all my paintings, the animal is at the centre. Surrounding it are the things that define the animal. This is how beauty is characterized. You need to characterize beauty by association.
I have learned to worship beauty. Not ordinary beauty but that in its stormiest nature.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#16. The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.
Hans Arp
#18. I only can write a book every two years, you know. And I write very fast, but I'm not always writing every day. I needed a contact with different things, like nature, for example. I cannot be in front of a computer trying to tell a story.
Paulo Coelho
#19. 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
#20. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into panic.
E.B. White
#21. I was still very hopeful that much work lay ahead of me. Perhaps because much of what I had worked on or thought about had not yet been put into writing, I felt I still had things in reserve. Given this optimistic nature, I feel this way even now when I am past sixty.
Stanislaw Ulam
#22. Unfortunately, in many cases, people who write science fiction violate the laws of nature, not because they want to make a point, but because they don't know what the laws of nature are.
Isaac Asimov
#23. The novel is a hybrid genre and a large part of its charm arises from the alluvial nature of its materials. There is nothing that doesn't suit a novelist in action, when he's in the course of writing his novel.
Enrique Vila-Matas
#24. 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
#25. The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
Julian Barnes
#26. It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.
Rachel Cusk
#27. There is something eternal in the very nature of writing, as is so graphically illustrated by the scriptures themselves. In a very real sense, our properly written histories are a very important part of our family scripture and become a great source of spiritual strength to us and to our posterity
John H. Groberg
#28. I've always got a whole bunch of things in the works. That's sort of the nature of the business. Even when you're doing something you love doing, you have to be plotting and scheming and writing and preparing for what you're going to do when that's finished.
Tom Green
#29. With pantheism ... the deity is associated with the order of nature or the universe itself ... when modern scientists such as Einstein and Stephen Hawking mention 'God' in their writing, this is what they seem to mean: that God is Nature.
Victor J. Stenger
#30. 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
#31. Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, and left the flushed print in a poppy there.
Francis Thompson
#32. When I'm drunk with feeling and nature is drinking from my lips and we reflect each other in our atmospheres, then my words come effortlessly and my fingers go into labor ... day or night.
Brandi L. Bates
#33. Do activities you're passionate about - which make your heart and soul feel perky - including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.
Karen Salmansohn
#34. Writing can be a very isolating profession. By its very nature, you spend a lot of your time barricaded in your house or office, typing on your own.
D. B. Weiss
#35. When you write, you're always revealing a difficult part of yourself. It may not be a part of yourself that looks as difficult - there are parts that look more difficult - but in fact, they are all difficult, and you get kind of used to doing that. It is sort of the nature of the thing.
Joan Didion
#36. In the woods is perpetual youth. In the woods we return to faith and reason.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#37. Listen to your instinct. It is your greatest treasure. Your beauty in the outside reflects your inner beauty.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#38. Nature in darkness groans and men are bound to sullen contemplation in the night: restless they turn on beds of sorrow; in their inmost brain feeling the crushing wheels, they rise, they write the bitter words of stern philosophy and knead the bread of knowledge with tears and groans.
William Blake
#39. The whole foot is a document of motion, inscribed by repeated action. Babies - from those first foetal footfalls, the kneading of sole against womb-wall, turning themselves like astronauts in black space - have already creased their soles by the time they emerge into the world.
Robert Macfarlane
#40. A hothouse flower trained to bloom out of season and in the wrong climate. I do not belong.
Karen Levy
#41. For a feature in next month's issue of Prog magazine, the photographer spent many hours setting up a photo shoot of me with part of my music collection in my writing office. Since I do most of my writing outside in nature, we felt this shot was most representative.
Kevin J. Anderson
#42. Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.
Daniel J. Rice
#43. ...in Dillard it's the comedy of rapture. Or at least it's a comedy that permits prose and thought to soar while inoculating the rapturous against the three ills of which nature writers should live in permanent dread: preciousness, reverence, and earnestness...
Geoff Dyer
#45. How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.
Matt Ridley
#46. I would write of the universal, not the provincial, in human nature ... I would write of characters, not of characteristics.
Ellen Glasgow
#47. Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.
H.P. Lovecraft
#48. Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus' Idylls to John Milton's 'Lycidas' and Percy Shelley's 'Adonais.'
Susan Stewart
#49. To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.
Mark Nepo
#50. We are doing the most important possible work in the world when we open the door and reveal our creative nature.
It is the work of the Universe itself.
Jacob Nordby
#52. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
#53. This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash, flipped through in succession, leaving a richness of images imprinted on a sunburned retina.
Ann Zwinger
#54. 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
#55. The nature of immortality is a mystery,' he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.' But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.
Robin Sloan
#56. At times, working in big cities far from nature, I have been sick with nesomania, and I think the reason is this: On the islands one has both the time and the inclination to communicate with the stars and the trees and the waves drifting ashore, one lives more intensely.
James A. Michener
#57. The density of the butterflies in the air now gave her a sense of being underwater, plunged into a deep pond among bright fishes.
Barbara Kingsolver
#58. I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
Paul Banks
#59. When Nature gives a gorgeous rose, Or yields the simplest fern, She writes this motto on the leaves, "To whom it may concern!" And so it is the poet comes And revels in her bowers, And, though another hold the land, Is owner of the flowers.
John Godfrey Saxe
#61. The Big Dipper wheels on its bowl. In years hence it will have stopped looking like a saucepan and will resemble a sugar scoop as the earth continues to wobble and the dipper's seven stars speed in different directions.
Ann Zwinger
#62. 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
#63. The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.
Marshall McLuhan
#64. 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
#65. And like any dog, like any savage, I lay there enjoying myself, harming no man, selling nothing, competing not at all, thinking no evil, smiled on by the sun, bent over by the trees, and softly folded in the arms of the earth.
John Stewart Collis
#66. I know as well as thee that I am no poet born
It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn
If I make verses-'tis in spite
Of nature and my stars I write.
Benjamin Franklin
#67. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#68. 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
#70. Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
John Darnielle
#71. Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a 'poetic mood'. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#72. There are occasions when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth, in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.
John Hay
#73. How many writers still dare compare a woman to Nature, like Campion? - there is a garden in her face - how lovely ...
John Geddes
#74. The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
John Mason Brown
#75. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
Virginia Woolf
#76. Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always "Stick 'em up!" In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.
A.S. Neill
#77. Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.
Virginia Woolf
#78. We are pantheists when we study nature, polytheists when we write poetry, monotheists in our morality.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#79. We must remember that in the end nature does not belong to us, we belong to it.
Grey Owl
#80. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.
Flannery O'Connor
#81. Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Andre Breton
#82. 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
#83. The nature of making music and making art, what motivates me is that it's interesting. It's interesting to listen, to really listen to other people's point-of-view. Take in their work. Listen to the way they sing. Listen to the way they write lyrics. What they are trying to express.
Emily Haines
#84. The purple haze of the wych elms; the blue flash of a kingfisher's wings; the statuesque rightness of the milch cows in that green place chomping on the rich flood-grass.
Ronald Frame
#85. I just started to want to be more hands on, and again, because of the nature of this job which was to evaluate the writing apart from the production, I got clear on what a director did and I became interested in directing, so I started to do that in the late 80s.
Rob Urbinati
#86. She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light. Whitened bones. A whited sepulcher.
Adam Foulds
#87. Nature has decreed that for what men suffer by having to shave, be killed in battle, and eat the legs of chickens, women make amends by housekeeping, childbirth, and writing all the letters for both of them ...
Jan Struther
#88. I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
Floyd Skloot
#89. When the sunlight hit the trees, all the beauty and wonder come together. Soul unfolds its petals. Flowering and fruiting of plants starts. The birds song light up the spinal column and harmonize the hippocampal functioning.
Amit Ray
#90. The lowest stress environment is the radio show. I am not on camera and I can let the music do the talking. The rest is more highly pressurized or in the case of writing, time intensive task. I say yes to all of it and like all of it but the radio show, by nature of what it is, is the least hassle.
Henry Rollins
#91. Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.
Fennel Hudson
#92. 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
#93. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
Charles Bukowski
#94. In order to actually have a touchscreen in front of me and somehow still be connected to nature, I needed to be able to incorporate natural elements into the song structures. Because that's always been my song-writing accompaniment: nature.
Bjork
#95. 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
#96. All in all, even some kinds of unexpected and ridiculous disappointments couldn't diminish the astonishment of being in this place with its spectacular nature.
Sahara Sanders
#97. 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
