Short Writing Quotes

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel
it is, before all, to make you see. ~ Joseph Conrad

I directed one of my shorts that did festivals around the world, and that was great. I've got a bit of a bug for that now. I just hope I keep challenging myself and keep doing stuff that interests me with people who I respect and who teach me stuff. If I can keep doing that in anything - acting, writing, directing or whatever - I'll do it because life is short. ~ Josh Lawson

Often, people build stories in their mind which have no basis in the contours of reality. Those which build these images, are building such images which are based on their relatively limited sense of understanding about the particular subject or person. This is a "fill in the blank" reality, which often manifests itself into the hearts and the minds of those who have a "fill in the blank" mindset, not the person with the here said reality.
The universe is designed in a way that reflects itself, just like a mirror, showing you exactly who you are to yourself, not who others are. Your largest and most concealed insecurities have their way of presenting themselves to you in a fashion that is relative to your self designed way of communication.
This short writing is a reminder that your preconceived notions on a particular subject or person, are a construct of your inner mind and emotional-relational well being and not of others. This is one of the largest fundamental truths in which you must have large insight to carefully watch who and what you massacre with your personal thoughts.
Having a keen sense of control on this subject will lead you to enlightenment in many platforms of life. ~ Will Barnes

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays. ~ Nicholson Baker

Could we say that the short short is to other kinds of fiction somewhat as the lyric is to other kinds of poetry? The lyric does not seek meaning through extension, it accepts the enigmas of confinement. It strives for a rapid unity of impression, an experience rendered in its wink of immediacy. And so too with the short short. ~ Irving Howe

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Nothing is too long or too short either if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a "graphic" writing style combined with educational aims. ~ Charles Portis

I want to write something so simple, so short and so silly ... and I want it to be for my brother. ~ Maurice Sendak

The nature of the writing and the nature of the animation meant that it had to be short. ~ Steve Dildarian

The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level. ~ David Brooks

I didn't just appear one day. I didn't just wake up and know how to write my name. I keep writing, knowing now that I was a long time coming. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true. ~ Nancy Pickard

Seated each afternoon in the darkened screening room, Halliday came to recognise the targeted numerals of the Academy leader as sigils preceding the dream state of a film. ~ William Gibson

Poe was the first writer to write about main characters who were bad guys or who were mad guys, and those are some of my favorite stories, ~ Stephen King

The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax. ~ Alfred Kazin

When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots. ~ Paula Hawkins

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin. ~ Donald Barthelme

Going to war against Iran - whether one calls such a move 'surgical' or 'total' - would be an extremely serious undertaking; with worldwide economic, military, diplomatic and human ramifications in both the short- and the long-term. ~ Bob Barr

Life's too short not to laugh about yourself and the cards you're dealt. ~ Mark Zupan

I started playing guitar before I can really remember, and I started writing really early, too. ~ Randy Houser

It's such a little thing to weep -
So short a thing to sigh -
And yet - by Trades - the size of these
We men and women die! ~ Emily Dickinson

Writing fiction is a way of expressing feelings and revealing a certain truth about life, goals, dreams and desires. ~ Ann Marie Aguilar

I didn't work for Jimmy Carter all those years to go to cocktail parties. I was there as a political adviser, a short-order cook, to work on topical matters. ~ Hamilton Jordan

When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water ... You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to. ~ Alan Lightman

"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

To secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it. ~ Winston Churchill

The single most important technique for making progress is to write ten words. Doesn't matter if you're badly stuck, or your day is completely jam-packed, or you're away from your computer - carry a small paper notebook and write a sentence of description while you're waiting on line at a coffee shop. I think of this as baiting a hook. Even if you have a few days in a row where nothing comes except those ten words, I find that as long as you have to think about the novel enough to write ten words, the chances are that more will come. ~ Naomi Novik

What is the song, the pop song? Is it a conduit to give out the feeling in a compact form, a short form? Shorter is better because it is physically much easier to share. A slogan verse a book, single versus record. What if it's blank white with really no cover? That leaves the meaning clear.
wait?
It's more vague.
With no hints to intentions.
Except that maybe the intention was to seem vague
or not to have a cover.
Maybe just there's no cover
And if the children cared then the children are pissed. You said you wanted pop but instead you got this....

~ Brendan Fowler

Frankly, I have always dreaded writing - there always seemed to be pain involved, unpleasant self-examination and a lot of fear. ~ Trent Reznor

Life is ours to be spent, not to
be saved. ~ D.H. Lawrence

I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. ~ Andrea Arnold

Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that. ~ Stephen King

Thou shalt not live within thy means
Nor on plain water and raw greens.
If thou must choose
Between the chances, choose the odd;
Read The New Yorker, trust in God;
And take short views. ~ W. H. Auden

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it. ~ Leslie Jamison

There's so many things I want to do. I want to work with great filmmakers, great actors, great scripts. And there's no reason for me to do anything short of that, because I'm 24, I don't have a family, I don't need to make tons of money, and I'm not dying to get famous. ~ Tobey Maguire

Providing a writer isn't put off by conventions - and some are - attending them can be a nice break from the necessary isolation of writing. ~ Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

I like to write about the way things used to be and paint pictures of my memories with beautiful words and melodies. ~ Lana Del Rey

I shall always feel respect for every one who has written a book, let it be what it may, for I had no idea of the trouble which trying to write common English could cost one - And alas there yet remains the worst part of all correcting the press. ~ Charles Darwin

You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it. ~ Tom Winton

I believe life's too short for compromises and bad fitting jeans ~ Lykke Li

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

Don't you sometimes find daily life almost unbearably poetic? Minute curiosity is a requirement of the travel writer – as it is of the biographer, novelist and poet. The significance of the trivial is what makes a piece of travel writing human, not the stuntish business of being the first person to paddle the Congo. Out there on the road, I have often found that the most aimless and boring interludes yield, in the long run, the most fertile material. ~ Sara Wheeler

Studying the world's oldest writing for the first time compels you to wonder about what writing is and how it came about more than five thousand years ago and what the world might have looked like without it.

Writing as I would define it serves to record language by means of an agreed set of symbols that enable a message to be played back like a wax cylinder recording.

The reader's eye runs over the signs and tells the brain how each is pronounced and the inner message springs into life. ~ Irving Finkel

I'm not a good writer, and I don't care. Unfortunately, after I left college, I didn't have time much for literature. I wish I did. Most of the time I read documents, and that's not going to help your writing. But I'm a very logical writer, and you can't get out of me. Once I've nailed you, you're finished. ~ Norman Finkelstein

I felt a failure because I couldn't sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn't hire me as a real writer. ~ Sandra Cisneros