Art Of Writing Quotes

The precedents for feminine self-expression run back through all the ages since the art of writing was invented ... The era may witness the first female engineer, motor truck chauffeur, radio broadcaster, head of an aviation school, or federal prohibition officer, but it has not produced the first thinking, creative, and writing woman by any means. ~ Mary Ritter Beard

The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral ... ~ Jorge Luis Borges

If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me. ~ Nell Stevens

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. ~ Cyril Connolly

I want my art to make people look at the world in a new way. I mean, what's the point of the art of writing if it doesn't take you into the mysterious? ~ John Banville

Whatever may be our natural talents, the art of writing is not acquired all at once. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings. ~ Stephen King

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The great art of writing is the art of making people real to themselves with words. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Achilles exists only through Homer . Take away the art of writing from this world , and you will probably take away its glory . ~ Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. If you write a piece for the fiddle that only one performer in a hundred can play you must not expect to hear it very often performed. The musical analogy is no longer a remote one. ~ C.S. Lewis

NOVEL, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes - some of which have a large sale. ~ Ambrose Bierce

Music teaches us about lyricism in writing, a delicate turn of phrase, selectiveness with words, rhythmic passages. Most of all, music, like good writing, touches our emotions with cadences that slip in like a subtle visitor, familiar and known before. ~ Suzy Davies

The art of writing was independently born in these four regions and I do not think it a coincidence that the advent of the written word was nourished by river water. ~ Olivia Laing

For life is short and the art of writing books is very, very long. ~ James Geary

The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!- ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

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

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: 'What's important is not the emotion they're playing but the emotion they're trying to conceal. ~ John Yorke

Programming is the art of writing essays in crystal clear prose and making them executable ~ Per Brinch Hansen

How strange a thing this art of writing did seem at it's first invention, we may guess by late discovered Americans, who were amazed to see men Converse with books, and could scarce make themselves to believe that a paper could speak.. ~ John Wilkins

[EM] Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people's books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. The Zen masters of archery - of whom, in those days, Christopher had never heard - start by teaching you the mental attitude with which you must pick up the bow. A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen. ~ Christopher Isherwood

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

Coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes. ~ David Mermin

Listen closely. There's a remote possibility that you might learn something: First, I don't give a damn if my work is commercial or not ... I'm the writer. If what I write is good, then people will read it. That's why literature exists. An author puts his heart and guts on the page. For your information, a good novel can change the world. Keep that in mind before you attempt to sit down at a typewriter. Never waste time on something you don't believe in yourself. ~ John Fante

But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called Sympathetic Nature. ~ Giambattista Vico

On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women. ~ Dennis R. Miller

When I'm writing, really writing, everything but breathing is an ignorable distraction. ~ Dennis R. Miller

There, I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. Alas, no one taught me this kind of chase, and the ancient inborn art of writing is long since forgotten - forgotten are the days when it needed no schooling, but ignited and blazed like a forest fire - today it seems just as incredible as the music that once used to be extracted from a monstrous pianoforte, music that would nimbly ripple or suddenly hack the world into great, gleaming blocks - I myself picture all this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the irreparable calamity. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination ~ Danielle M. Maistry

The great art of writing is knowing when to stop. ~ Josh Billings

... the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea ... . It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to a shape ... .
You have not finished with it because you have read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part. Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm, knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and talk. ~ Virginia Woolf

The art of writing is not as solitary as one might think. When it finally dawns on us one day that our task as writers is to share what we know of the human spirit, we suddenly discover that we were never truly alone. ~ Hal Zina Bennett

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well. ~ Edward Abbey

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it? ~ Ayn Rand

In the world's history certain inventions and discoveries occurred of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveris. Of these were the art of writing and of printing, the discovery of America, and the introduction of patent laws. The date of the first ... is unknown; but it certainly was as much as fifteen hundred years before the Christian era; the second-printing-came in 1436, or nearly three thousand years after the first. The others followed more rapidly-the discovery of America in 1492, and the first patent laws in 1624. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. ~ Samuel Johnson

The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. ~ John Steinbeck

If you write literary fiction that's set partly in the future, you're apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

In fact I wonder if I should bend my own rules a little and for the sake of writing a good song it doesn't have to been so autobiographical, but that's a stupid rule to live by as some of my favourite artists' songs, they have a song that you think is about their life [which] probably even isn't, but it's a great song. ~ The Rocket Summer

I don't think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction for the Holy and the disbelief in it that we breathe in with the air of the times. ~ Flannery O'Connor

The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it. ~ Alice Miller

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

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. ~ Frederic Chopin

That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude. ~ C.S. Lewis

Writing is like a breath of fresh air. ~ Chantal Bellehumeur

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods. ~ George Bernard Shaw

What would normal people think if they knew what went on in a writer's mind below the surface? They'd think him even more around the bend than they had previously supposed if they could see the witches' cauldron of images and memories boiling up from the subconscious, impressions whirling in from without, ideas and insights bursting up like bubbles and gone again before they can be seized. And the hopelessness of the business, the whole infuriating, exhausting, fascinating business of grabbing something out of the turmoil and imposing upon it some faint shadow or rumor of the order, pattern and rhythm of the world. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do. ~ Ben Schott

Sufism is a vast and varied historical and civilizational phenomenon, touching upon poetic expression and sacred art, ethics and virtue, discipleship and spiritual guidance, humble service and spiritual practice, the nourishment of the heart and the illumination of vision. Yet all these many concerns coalesce ultimately to a single concern: that of the return to God. The way of this return is, at root, a matter of the ever-deepening inculcation of the reality of Divine Unity in one's being, as expressed in one's understanding, one's presence and attention, and ultimately one's very existence. This "Path of Unity" is none other than the central course of the entire tradition of Sufism. What ~ Peter Samsel

I think there's a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender. ~ Brian Eno

You know, a vampire book is not a book to be the vehicle for big themes and stuff, where sometimes when you're dealing with art or the life of Christ or the oeuvre of Shakespeare, you know, it's a little more ambitious. ~ Christopher Moore

As a journalist you have to think quickly, you're exposed to all types of people and situations and you've got to synthesize your thoughts in a very clear and concise way and write them down quickly. Those were all things that have proven really useful in my life as a television writer. ~ Frank Spotnitz

She said, "Your approach is wrong. You're writing an essay rather than creating a literary figure. What a literary character does in ten minutes might be a reflection of ten years' experience. You can't be limited to the plot of a novel - you've got to imagine her entire life, and what actually gets put into words is just the tip of the iceberg." So ~ Liu Cixin

As yet we use our media only for selling things - including, of course, political candidates. What will happen when someone masters the art of selling souls? ~ Erica Jong

People think, "Wow, people in America have so much money, they're sending hundreds of pencils to this guy." I don't think those people realize that most people who are buying these pencils are buying them as art objects or conversation pieces. ~ David Rees

The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse - it will not submit to the mold of flattery. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

My job takes up many daylight hours, it wakes me in the still of night and fills my head with ghosts and monsters but I love it, telling stories is what I was born to do. ~ Ken Scott

You gave me a soul touch. A touch beyond physical. The most powerful of touch. I thought it was about you but I was wrong it was about me. In me. It took me a lifetime to realize it was me, not you. Thank you for showing me my soul. ~ Renae A. Sauter

Mac [Barnett ] and I have been friends for more than ten years. We met working at an educational nonprofit. And we have been pranking each other the whole time. It's our own version of a prank war. We thought we would channel some of that energy into writing a book. ~ Jory John

Without a clear focus on the scandal of wage labor and original accumulation, on capitalism's awful history of possession and dispossession, both art and politics mistake images for the enemy. ~ Anonymous

Cyril: surely you would acknowledge that art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.
Vivian: Certainly not! art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance ~ Oscar Wilde

Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay. ~ Elmore Leonard

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

The prompt Paris morning struck its cheerful notes - in a soft breeze and a sprinkled smell, in the light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace-walls were warm, in the blue-frocked brass-labelled officialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep references of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a white-gaitered red-legged soldier. He watched little brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed with art, something that presented nature as a white-capped master-chef. The ~ Henry James

There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically ... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous. ~ Stephen Shore

It is the bane, and pleasure when creating Romance fiction, to know immersion and fulfillment for the reader are based on clarity. Clarity of plot, clarity of message, clarity of the characters, clarity of the changes going on inside of them, clarity of the darkest moment -- but don't you dare be obvious
~ Persuasion for the Endowment of Sex Appeal (Academic Paper) ~ Glenn Hefley

The world is a complicated place, and there's a lot of division between people. The performing arts tend to unify people in a way nothing else does. ~ David Rubenstein

I intend to keep writing stories that piss people off, that tell the particular kind of truth I think is valid, that will make me feel more and more like a Writer of Stature, Which I honestly think I am, really, I mean it, I don't doubt it for a second dammit, so stop giggling! Stories that will make Dr Shedd sniff the air and make Lester smile as je thinks, The kid's coming along all right. ~ Harlan Ellison

The art of sensuality encompassing the exploration and experiencing of all our senses... Those images are being born from and through living the moments of eating favorite chocolate cake with ice-cream, tranquil meditating, walking the beach and feeling the warm breeze on your face and the soothing sand beneath your feet, watching a never repeating its symphony sunset, dancing and feeling your body move through space, smelling flowers in a garden, painting or working with clay, with your fingertips gently touching piano keys or pulling the tense strings of guitar, caressing your ears with the whispers of one's soul, diving into the depth of loving you eyes, and, joining in a passionate kiss of life...the life of the artist... ~ Oksana Rus