Top 100 Writing Means Quotes
#2. My pen.' Funny, I wrote that without noticing. 'The torch', 'the paper', but 'my pen'. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It's about the most important thing I own.
John Marsden
#3. What writing means to me?
-Releasing my wolves...
(Natasa Alina Culea)
Nata?a Alina Culea
#4. Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions.
Paulo Coelho
#5. Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.
Allan Gurganus
#6. If a lunatic scribbles a jumble of mathematical symbols it does not follow that the writing means anything merely because to the inexpert eye it is indistinguishable from higher mathematics.
Eric Temple Bell
#7. Writing means organizing your thoughts. If your mind is scattered, your writing is scattered. If your mind is focused, your writing will be clear. Then your reader will say, 'Yes, I get it.
Robert Peate
#8. The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.
Harlan Ellison
#9. The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.
Abi Morgan
#10. Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.
William Strunk Jr.
#11. Writing means revealing oneself to excess.
Franz Kafka
#13. Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace
it.
Veronica Roth
#14. It means they engineered the spirit to have a negative effect on the imagination.
S.A. Tawks
#15. You thought I was writing The Truth? Honey, I don't even know what The Truth means.
Hugh Elliot
#16. But you're sleep, and you're a few miles away, and I have no means to get to you right now, so I'm writing.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#17. 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
#18. I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
Marilyn Hacker
#19. Dialogue is the ideal means of showing what is between the characters. It crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, be so effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary.
Elizabeth Bowen
#20. I think inspiration is strongest when I find a balance between observation and participation. You can't write about what it means to dance by watching from the bleachers.
Chelsey Philpot
#21. At the beginning, I experienced writing as a sort of constraint. Starting so young as a writer is pitiable: it's beyond your powers; you have to lay bare things that are very heavy, and you don't have the means for that.
Patrick Modiano
#22. But it's only after you've played it on the road 20 or 30 times that it becomes really finished and polished ... and you realize what it means, and you get the phrasing right.
James Taylor
#23. I often find that I rock back and forth with a beat in my head constantly. If i stop rocking, it usually means I've hit a snag in my writing.
Mitch Albom
#24. Now I am writing this diary in English, which for me is not the language of intimacy or love, but an attempt at distance and sanity, a means of recalling normality.
Jasmina Tesanovic
#25. You get right down to it, writing is no means to self-help. It's scarcely a passing attempt at self-help.
Haruki Murakami
#26. I write intuitively, and with most of my plays, I don't know what is always going to happen. This means I can sometimes go off on a wrong tangent, and with luck then rewrite it in a better direction. But it means I sometimes surprise myself as I'm going along.
Christopher Durang
#27. Romans themselves never read silently, but always aloud; they regarded language as speaking and listening, and viewed writing as merely a convenient means of recording communications spoken and heard.
Anonymous
#28. All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.
George Berkeley
#29. You have an absolute freedom in Mexican writing today in which you don't necessarily have to deal with the Mexican identity. You know why? Because we have an identity ... We know who we are. We know what it means to be a Mexican.
Carlos Fuentes
#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. Everything I write means a lot to me because it is my head on paper.
Mitch Lucker
#32. I opted for a freelance writing career. I was lucky enough to have the means to do it.
Matt Ridley
#33. I need to tell the things that are important but which don't make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.
Akhil Sharma
#34. The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.
Mason Cooley
#35. If you're "one in a million", and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.
Jeff Goins
#37. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,
Francis A. Schaeffer
#38. The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.
Dara Horn
#39. When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
Umberto Eco
#40. I had e-mail in 1984! I had an e-mail address then, which means that all you could write to was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. There were three of us, writing to each other.
Penn Jillette
#41. DWIGHT:
Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn.
Sometimes that means dying.
Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people.
Frank Miller
#42. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
M.V. Carey
#43. A writers desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature, and he'll start by imitating whatever he's read, which usually means what the people around him are writing.
Northrop Frye
#44. Charlie Rangel was writing laws on our taxes as chair of the Ways and Means Committee while somehow neglecting to pay his own.
Nancy Gibbs
#45. What it means to serve Him. I am writing with the hope that as you cry and laugh with my family you will
Katie J. Davis
#46. Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means.
William Kittredge
#47. I would like to sit and and write some acoustic stuff. That's what I want to do. It means creatively, that's what I want so I need to do that for myself and then I'll see.
Avril Lavigne
#48. A dry period for me means perhaps going two or three nights without writing. I probably have dry periods but I'm not aware of them and I go on writing, only the writing probably isn't much good.
Charles Bukowski
#49. I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God ... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe
Donald Knuth
#50. I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.
Alexander Payne
#51. Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#52. I write songs so that people can make them into what it means to them as well.
William Beckett
#53. Writing, for me, means humility. It's a process that involves fear and doubt, especially if you're writing honestly.
Kiran Desai
#54. Learning to write is not a linear process. There is no logical A-to-B-to-C way to become a good writer. One neat truth about writing cannot answer it all. There are many truths. To do writing practice means to deal ultimately with your whole life.
Natalie Goldberg
#55. I dread the promotion part of my job. It's agony, especially compared to the private, at-home joy of writing. But being a grown-up means doing every part of the larger task.
Chuck Palahniuk
#56. 'Writing' always means 'not writing' to me because I will do anything to put it off. I think this is mainly because writing anything down and then handing it over to a third party - especially in comedy - is such an exposing act that you naturally want to delay the process.
Catherine Tate
#57. I think if you write humor, then people don't - you know - they don't give you that much credit. They tend to think you just dictate your stories into a tape recorder. And I'm not necessarily insulted by that, because I think that just means that it looks easy.
David Sedaris
#58. I've gone periods of maybe four months without writing anything, but it's not a problem. It just means something's building inside you, and it'll build and it'll build, and at some point it'll come out, and it does, and it usually comes out in three or four songs, and you play it that way, really.
Jamie Lawson
#59. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
#60. Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored. Writing is a jealous and needy lover.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#61. To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.
Chuck Palahniuk
#62. Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.
Jami Attenberg
#63. 20a. What You Should Be Writing About
Anything you can't get rid of by other means.
Steve Almond
#64. You look at any industry - you're not innovating unless people are questioning it. If you're innovating, you're doing something nobody's done before, which means you're re-writing rules, resetting boundaries, re-creating systems. And that means the traditional industry is going to question it.
Ryan Kavanaugh
#65. I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object.
Elena Ferrante
#66. Writing about our gods in English is unnatural, but I believe language is just a carrier - a means to an end.
Amish Tripathi
#67. So the real drama for me is balancing live performances and writing, and one of the ways I balance it is I write in hotel rooms. That's not exactly balancing. Actually, writing in hotel rooms means that I'm refusing to deal with the problem.
Philip Glass
#68. The will to originality is not the will to be peculiar and unlike anybody else; it means the desire to derive one's consciousness from its primary source.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#69. There's no "magic secret"; writing is like everything else; ten percent inspiration or talent, and ninety percent hard work. Persistence; keeping at it till you get there. As Agnes de Mille said, it means working every day - bored, tired, weary, or with a fever of a hundred and two.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#70. Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'.
L. Ron Hubbard
#71. Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable - like I'm about to cry any second - and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Andre Dubus III
#72. As a writer I have always fought for the right to write. For writing is a time-honored means of communication. Lack of communication, the refusal of some to understand, or outright refusal to learn about other human beings is based on fear. Fear is what keeps people apart.
Piri Thomas
#73. Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum
#75. I've left it unedited, which means you'll get to see the [brackets] I insert to remind myself to research things or fix things later. In this case, I fixed things by writing a different story.
Mary Robinette Kowal
#76. Not to write, for many of us, is to die. We must take ares each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
Ray Bradbury
#77. With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.
Paullina Simons
#78. A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.
Margaret Fuller
#79. In fact, if you look at the root word of phonograph it just means phonetics of graphology, phono-graph, writing with sound, so graphology. You know graffiti, same root word.
DJ Spooky
#80. In writing scripts now, having made a film, I'm much more conscious of what it means to shoot and edit a movie, and that affects the writing.
Josh Radnor
#82. Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'
Haruki Murakami
#83. Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.
Jo Deurbrouck
#84. Rarely will I write indoors, even if it means getting wet during rain, or my hands numb in winter.
Fennel Hudson
#85. Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
Gabrielle Zevin
#86. As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
#87. Great writers are indecent people they live unfairly saving the best part for paper. good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it.
Charles Bukowski
#88. Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
#89. Exercise and writing are so therapeutic to me. I try to write every day and I make it a huge priority to find time to work out, even if that means taking a spin class at 7am before work.
Sadie Calvano
#90. I believe the term "blog" means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.
Michael Arrington
#91. Since when did the community become our moral compass - our viability and ethics as writers determined so much by our team spirit? ... What if all this communing actually hurts the primary means by which I set out to participate and communicate - my writing itself?
Meghan Tifft
#92. If someone decides to be a musician now, it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it, it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now, there is no hope for money at the end of it.
Douglas Coupland
#93. Being a parent means my time use has to be a bit more focused, but it also gives me a new non-writing dimension to my life, which is a healthy thing. I can't wander along for weeks with an idea drifting through my head - I have someone who will drag me back into life, and that's a good thing.
Nick Earls
#94. Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us.
Susan Wittig Albert
#95. I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
William Faulkner
#96. I'm not ritualistic about writing. I try to write as often as possible, which means that I have to be able to write in all kinds of situations, whether it's at home on my couch, out at a cafe, or traveling.
Cassandra Clare
#97. I personally am a 'discovery writer,' as we're termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then revising the entire thing. When it comes to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces into a book.
Katharine Kerr
#98. More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning.
Susan Stewart
#99. Writing is simply another means for truth to escape, besides crawling out the hole it's eaten in the author's belly.
Dianne Kozdrey Bunnell
#100. Holy writing must strive (by all means) for perfection and true holiness, that a door may be opened to him in heaven.
Henry Vaughan
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