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Writing Quotes

The page is led by Shakespeare, then William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well, followed by Horace and Orwell. Three old sources are worth knowing: Bacon’s Meditationes Sacræ (1597) says reading makes a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man; Thoreau’s journal for 1838 says it is vain to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live; and Horace’s Ars Poetica is the source for the idea that the writer wins by mixing profit with pleasure.

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then for your friends, then for money” is credited to Virginia Woolf and flagged misattributed. The notes quote an anecdote from a Tyrol coffee-house in which someone else says something similar. Two more flagged lines are credited to Cicero and to Menander.

Random quote on Writing

Most quoted on writing:

I identify first and foremost as a writer and I love writing, and reading

Edwige-Renée Dro

Writing a book for the Follies seems to be about as profitable an occupation as furnishing flannel petticoats for the showgirls. p. 151

Dorothy Parker Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014)

I have a paper cut from writing my suicide note. [sighs] It's a start...

Steven Wright When the Leaves Blow Away (2006) / I Still Have a Pony (2007)

No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. (20 December 1939)

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day (1935)

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

Norman Mailer Interview for French TV (1998)

Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination.

Edna O'Brien Irish Women Writers Speak Out (2003)

I don't want to regurgitate. Writing should be constantly an act of creation and going forward into the new.

Maxine Hong Kingston

writing about Algeria is an endless discovery of a history I was never taught.

Marnia Lazreg

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

John Irving Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1988)

Ooh, look at me, I’m Dave, I’m writing a book! With all my thoughts in it. La la la!

Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (2000)

I was the first one probably in writing to use a nickname, Mickey, and it stuck.

Mickey Spillane Crime Time interview (2001)

Every single Muslim historian of medieval India lists temples which the rulers he is writing about has destroyed and the mosques he has built instead. (429)

Arun Shourie Indian controversies: Essays on religion in politics (1993)

"I love writing about my job because I loved it, and it was a particularly interesting one when I was a young man. It was like holidays with pay to me."

James Herriot

I am interested in writing into being a Zimbabwe that feels complete, and not one that is only peopled with those of whom I approve

Petina Gappah

One of the very earliest uses to which the art of writing was put, along with alphabetic exercises and marks of ownership, was sexual insult and obscenity.

Mabel Lang

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. ("Writing Short Stories")

Flannery O'Connor Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969)

(Writing motto:) "You'll never know what happened in the hunt until the lion's story."

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa In Latina Authors and Their Muses (2015)

Our generation of writers should, as far as we can, professionalize writing

Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ

I’ve always regarded writing as a vocation more than a career. Vocation as in “calling,” as in “being summoned,” from the Latin vocare, which means “to call.”

Valerie Miner with Stanford Institute for Gender Research (2017)

I don’t have a sacred writing space, but I do write better after midnight, when I’m surrounded by creative energy

Dudu Busani-Dube

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