Quotes about Writing

“I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics — New York critics as a rule — who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.”
Maya Angelou, The Paris Review Interviews: Volume IV

“Don’t overdress your thought in fine language.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, via The Daily Stoic (Page 115)

“Whatever the next thing is I write, it’s got to be even more naked than the last.”
Harold Pinter, via Sunbeams (Page 50)

“There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Bernard Malamud, via Daily Rituals (Page 233)

“Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go. In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night—six hours, seven, maybe even the recommended eight—so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.”
Stephen King, via Daily Rituals (Page 224)

“I don’t hold myself to longer hours; if I did, I wouldn’t gain by it. The only reason I write is because it interests me more than any other activity I’ve ever found. I like riding, going to operas and concerts, travel in the west; but on the whole writing interests me more than anything else. If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die. I make it an adventure every day. I get more entertainment from it than any I could buy, except the privilege of hearing a few great musicians and singers. To listen to them interests me as much as a good morning’s work.”
Willa Cather, via Daily Rituals (Page 199) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜

“I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again.”
John Updike, via Daily Rituals (Page 195) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜

“I don’t believe in draining the reservoir, do you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it, while I still have things to say.”
Henry Miller, via Daily Rituals (Page 53) | Read Matt’s Blog on this quote ➜

“Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.”
Lillian Hellman, Sunbeams (Page 31)

C. Day Lewis Quote on Writing and How We Write To Understand; Not To Share What We Already Know

“I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it… We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image, via Sunbeams (Page 15)

Beyond the Quote (385/365)

It starts out as a feeling. An inquisition. A hunch. A curiosity. A reoccurring thought. An observation. An idea. A single line of text.

It proceeds as an exploration into the unknown. A navigating of unclear roads. A charting of unexplored territory. An unraveling of knotted up mental yarn. A sorting through of an unorganized desk. As trains of thought.

“One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one’s own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.”
Robert Bly, Sunbeams (Page 5)

“The less others really knew about me, I reasoned, the less ammunition they’d have to make me look foolish. Only if I revealed my tender spots could they wound me. My true self, the one I kept so deeply concealed, only emerged in my diaries. There, I could unveil. On cotton pages scrawled with purple ink, I didn’t have to be tough or brave or capable or strong. I could just be me.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 30)

“The most reputable [news] outlets entertain their audience with the truth. They tell true stories. But even then, they know that it’s not the truth that generates profits—it’s always the stories. Stories keep us tuned in. Stories sell newspapers. Stories get clicks. Yes, truth matters. But when it comes to the bottom line, journalism isn’t a truth business. It’s a story business.”
Brandon Stanton, Humans (Page 177)

Stephen King Quote on the Relationship Between Reading and Writing

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
Stephen King

Beyond the Quote (343/365)

What happens when you read? Your eyes scan, decode, and lift symbols off pages and implants the information contained into your brain. It’s essentially the same process that a computer follows when it downloads new software/ updates. And as it’s true with computers, the information that’s downloaded/ implanted into our minds may either contain updates/improvements or infections/malware. This is why, just as you have to be very careful with what you download onto your computer, you have to be just as careful (if not more) about what you download into your brain.

“’If my opinion runs more than twenty pages,’ she said, ‘I am disturbed that I couldn’t do it shorter.’ The mantra in her chambers is ‘Get it right and keep it tight.’ She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion’s opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. ‘If you can say it in plain English, you should,’ RBG says. Going through ‘innumerable drafts,’ the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. ‘I think that law should be a literary profession,’ RBG says, ‘and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft.’”
Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Tony Robbins Quote on Accomplishments and Getting Better at Managing Time

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year—and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.”
Tony Robbins

Beyond the Quote (241/365)

When I first started MoveMe Quotes in 2010, I was so self-conscious about my writing and my own voice as a writer that I could only post other people’s words. I wouldn’t add, subtract, change, or elaborate on anything—I shared quotes and that’s it. I refused to share my opinion because I felt unworthy when surrounded by such giants in the writing world. I would constantly ask myself, “Who am I to comment on words from this great person or that amazing writer?” And so that’s how it went for the first five years of MoveMe Quotes. I was merely a quote collector and organizer.

“Instead of carrying that baggage around in our heads or hearts, we put it down on paper. Instead of letting racing thoughts run unchecked or leaving half-baked assumptions unquestioned, we force ourselves to write and examine them. Putting your own thinking down on paper lets you see it from a distance. It gives you objectivity that is so often missing when anxiety and fears and frustrations flood your mind. What’s the best way to start journaling? Is there an ideal time of day? How long should it take? Who cares? How you journal is much less important than why you are doing it: To get something off your chest. To have quiet time with your thoughts. To clarify those thoughts. To separate the harmful from the insightful. There’s no right way or wrong way. The point is just to do it.”
Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key (Page 56)

Anne Frank Quote on Reflection and Doing Better Each Day

“How noble and good everyone could be if at the end of the day they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day, and after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal.”
Anne Frank, via Stillness is the Key (Page 53)

Beyond the Quote (104/365)

How often do you just sit down at the end of a long day and reflect? Reflect on what went well and what didn’t go so well; what could have been improved and what could have been discarded; what made you smile and what made you sad; what you might have done differently and what you think was right on point. See, reflection isn’t just about thinking. What really happens when you take time to reflect on your day is you are taking responsibility for what happened and you are taking control of where you’re heading. Reflection, in this sense, is your Life GPS.