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Quotes tagged “Writing”

“Yet writing a poem about something painful, she has discovered, can be her way of digesting it. 'One of the things I’ve learned is, if we try and put sadness off, it just waits. And in my experience, running away from sadness doesn’t do anybody any good.'”
— Frieda Hughes, Frieda Hughes: ‘I felt my parents were stolen’
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Literature, Pain, Sad, Loneliness, Depression
“We are all going forward. None of us are going back.”
— Richard Siken, Crush
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Moving Forward, Life, Progress
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Tagged: Writing, Pain, Trauma, Healing, Honesty, expression, Self-Expression, vulnerability
“A book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out. ”
— George Lichtenberg, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization
Tagged: Mirrors, Writing, Books, Literature, Best Reading Quotes
“On February 8, 2009, at 12:30am, Chris Brown 
 beat Rihanna’s face into a landscape of craters 
 and bruises. This is the architecture of violence. 
 Later, Chris Brown described their relationship 
 as being similar to Romeo and Juliet’s. 

In 2013, David O. Russell groped 
his niece’s breasts and claimed 
she had flirted with him first. 

In 1965, Sean Connery told Playboy 
there was nothing wrong with beating a woman. 
That “bloody-minded,” “hysterical,” “bitch” 
women should be hit, should be slapped. 

In 2014, Julia Sonenshein wrote an article 
titled “10 Violent Men Who Are Always Forgiven 
Because Everyone Loves Their Art.” 


They say it’s a myth that mother rabbits
abandon their young in their nests 
after their young have been handled 
by humans. That the scent of humans 
will drive the mother away. 
They say it’s a myth. 
And that the young, no matter how battered 
or bruised, will still be accepted 
by their caregivers. 


But in the human world, the rules change. 
After the rape, most of my rapist’s friends 
abandoned me. One claimed I only wanted 
to profit off my art. 


No one considered that blood 
does not make good paint. 
That trauma is an electric chair 
that singes anyone it can reach. 
It wasn’t my art, remember? 
It was his. 
And he was always forgiven 
because they loved his art.”
— Meggie Royer, It’s Time to Stop Forgiving Our Male Heroes
Tagged: Poetry, Writing, Sexual Assault, Trigger Warning, Rape Culture, Trauma
“I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.”
— Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes
Tagged: Love, Writing
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
— Stephen King, Writing Tips From Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’
Tagged: Writing, Fear, Inspirational, Courage, Wisdom
“Some one said: 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
— T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tagged: Emotion of Art, Living In The Moment, Writing, Writing In The Present, Experience, Writing Consciously
“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”
— T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
Tagged: Emotion of Art, Living In The Moment, Writing, Writing In The Present, Experience, Writing Consciously
“My work as a sculptor has trained me to write in the same way. When I start a piece I work it from all directions. I jump back and forth from section to section in no particular order. I leave broad ideas and impressions everywhere. I make notations and draw charts. I don’t write in complete sentences. I don’t bother with spelling, and I don’t fuss with exacting language.”
— Annie Weatherwax, Structure: What Writers Can Learn from Visual Artists
Tagged: Writing, Being A Writer, The Craft Of Writing, The Art Of Writing, Art And Writing
“When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.”
— Jen Knox, After The Gazebo
Tagged: Philosophy, Psychology, Writing, The Art of Awareness, How To Think
“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. 

Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am sure the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals-sounds that say listen to this, it is important. 

So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.”
— Gary Provost, 100 Ways To Improve Your Writing
Tagged: Philosophy, How To Think, Writing
“You arrived in town like a tidal wave.”
— Ari Eastman, We Weren’t Forever, But That Doesn’t Mean We Didn’t Matter
Tagged: Writing, The Ocean, Beaches, Love
“No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down. Why then, is writer's block endemic? 

The reason we don't get talker's block is that we're in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied. We talk poorly and then, eventually (or sometimes), we talk smart. We get better at talking precisely because we talk. We see what works and what doesn't, and if we're insightful, do more of what works. How can one get talker's block after all this practice? 

Writer's block isn't hard to cure. Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.”
— Seth Godin, Talker's Block
Tagged: Writing, Psychology, Philosophy, Breakdown = Breakthrough
“Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.”
— David Ogilvy, No Results Found
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer
“I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, ‘Can I do something with that?'”
— No Results Found
Tagged: Writing, How to be a writer, Transparency
“I thought about the notebooks I filled up in high school, the ones that I’m still too scared to open up and revisit, not because I think my bad writing will make me cringe, but because I’m afraid my bad writing will make me yearn to write like that again—and I don’t mean writing poems that compare my loneliness to a black hole or my love to a prairie devastated by fire, but rather to write with tremendous heart and without concern for taste or craft, without concern for the entire wretched literary canon that has come before me, the literary canon that is still mostly populated by boring, uninspiring white dudes whose writing will never change my life.”
— Jenny Zhang, The Importance Of Angsty Art
Tagged: Writing, Art, Creation, Innocennce, Freedom, Literary Liberation, How I Feel Today
“I have to believe that the stories I write are true. I don’t care if they are real, but I have to believe that they’re true. I know that reality and truth are not always the same thing. I’m not interested in reality, but I have a great interest in truth. I have to believe that the story I write every time is true, and I have to believe in what my characters say, what they do, what they feel. That takes a lot of time. To me they are strangers. Maybe they’re human beings that are born out of my imagination, but I have to get to know them and I have to believe them.”
— Christos Ikonomou, Plough Shares at Emerson College: An Interview by Maria Eliades
Tagged: Creation, Writing, Truth, Honesty, The Creative Process
“The honest to god truth? In the year prior to becoming a full-time producer and writer, I wrote over 350 pieces for various publications. I worked to get where I am today. It wasn’t just lucky. It was work. But I’d do it all over again.”
— Kendra Syrdal, 5 Things (5.8.16)
Tagged: Writing on the internet, Writing, feminism, Career, How to be a writer
“Will someone decide they know exactly who I am without getting to know me outside of a 900 word essay?”
— Kendra Syrdal, 5 Things (5.8.16)
Tagged: Writing on the internet, Writing, Please don't google me, Modern Dating

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About The Authors

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.