Quotes on Writing :: Finest Quotes

Writing Quotes

Is the new generation of writers more concerned than their predecessors with politics, economics, and social class? I think that there are lowered expectations, not sthetic expectations for the work, but lowered expectations in terms of life. My generation, perhaps foolishly, expected, even demanded, that life be wonderful and magical and then tried to make it so by writing in a rather complex way. It seems now quite an eccentric demand.

Donald Barthelme

Pope has more virulence and less vehemence than any of the great satirists. His character of Sporus is the perfection of satirical writing. The very sound of words scarify before the sense strikes.

Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

I think the next little bit of excitement is ﬂying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

Samuel Beckett

I dont blame you for writing of me as you have. You had to believe other stories, but then I dont know if any one would believe anything good of me anyway.

Henry McCarty

The only hope I had was when (in his youth, fh)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

Joseph Beuys

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Robert Charles Benchley

Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.

Robert Charles Benchley

When we read the best nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists, we soon realize that they are trying in a variety of ways to establish a definition of human nature, to justify the continuation of life as well as the writing of novels.

Saul Bellow

The first star vehicle of the summer of 1996 is also the first major disappointment of the season. Mission: Impossible, the big-screen resurrection of the popular late-'60s/early-'70s series, fails to generate much in the way of excitement or intrigue. This globetrotting adventure looks like an opportunity for Tom Cruise to play James Bond a role he is totally unsuited for. The writing for last year's 007 return, GoldenEye, isn't a lot better than that for Mission: Impossible, but, as an action hero, Pierce Brosnan is considerably more debonair and charismatic than Cruise.

James Berardinelli

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and hed never have written a word.

Alan Bennett

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. [...] Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

Walter Bendix Schnflies Benjamin

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Georges Bizet

Not really. I thought it was going to be but never really got around to writing about anything in particular. Just a lot of instant song composing and regular themes that I wouldn't even want to elaborate on...

Cedric Bixler-Zavala

My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.

Michael Bloomberg

The practical politics of all the philosophers, no matter how-great their theoretical differences, were the same. They practiced an art of writing that appealed to the prevailing moral taste of the regime in which they found themselves, but which could lead some astute readers outside of it to the Elysian Fields where the philosophers meet to talk.

Allan David Bloom

Factoring in millions of people when I'm writing a song is not a good idea. I don't ever do it.

Taylor Swift

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht

One of the interesting things about writing a play is that when you've finished it you have to give it away.

Gyles Brandreth

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Jorge Luis Borges

Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.

Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Jorge Luis Borges

Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Jorge Luis Borges

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