Writes Quotes

1. "A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requires a leap of faith. The writer has to choose the right words to express his sentences, and then, once he has sealed the envelope, he has to place those thoughts in the hands of someone else, trusting that the feelings will be delivered, and that the recipient will understand the writer's intent. How childish to think that could be easy."
Author: Adriana Trigiani

2. "Somewhere Chesterton writes--I think it is Chesterton--that you cannot reason a man from a position that reason didn't deliver him to."
Author: Alec Wilkinson

3. "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."
Author: Alfred Kazin

4. "You are a man without a heart, Dr. Leddell.And you, Mary Cooper, are a meddler. A woman can be forgiven for many transgressions but not that.I have been called worse. And by people I hold in more esteem than you.Ha! I pity the poor man unfortunate enough to marry you someday. He writes his own ticket to hell.If he does, then I'll make that hell as pleasant a place for him as I know how. But I won't deceive him and tell him it's heaven, then stoke the fires behind his back and cover it all with the scent of lilacs"."
Author: Ann Rinaldi

5. "A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar."
Author: Arthur Koestler

6. "The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would have been not divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "In 1938, Louise Rosenblatt introduced reader response theory or the transactional view of reading. She asserted that what the reader brings to the reading act - his or her world of experiences, personality, and current frame of mind - is just as important in interpreting the text as what the author writes. According to this view, reading is a fusion of text and reader."
Author: Carl M. Tomlinson

8. "A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

9. "Out of the arms...out of the arms of one loveand into the arms of anotherI have been saved from dying on the crossby a lady who smokes potwrites songs and stories,and is much kinder than the last,much much kinder,and the sex is just as good or better.it isn't pleasant to be put on the cross and left there,it is much more pleasant to forget a love which didn'tworkas all lovefinallydoesn't work...it is much more pleasant to make lovealong the shore in Del Marin room 42, and afterwardssitting up in beddrinking good wine, talking and touchingsmokinglistening to the waves...I have died too many timesbelieving and waiting, waitingin a roomstaring at a cracked ceilingwaiting for the phone, a letter, a knock, a sound...going wild insidewhile she danced with strangers in nightclubs...out of the arms of one loveand into the arms of anotherit's not pleasant to die on the cross,it's much more pleasant to hear your name whispered in the dark."
Author: Charles Bukowski

10. "As Os Guinness writes, To be sure, calling is not what it is commonly thought to be. It has to be dug out from under the rubble of ignorance and confusion. And, uncomfortably, it often flies in the face of our human inclinations. But nothing short of God's call can ground and fulfill the truest human desire for purpose.3"
Author: Charles R. Swindoll

11. "It's always flattering when somebody you really respect and like wants you to be involved in their project - let alone writes a part with your voice in mind."
Author: Chris Messina

12. "Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself."
Author: Dario Argento

13. "David Shire and I have been happily married for 21 years! We have a 12-year-old son. David is a genius. He writes the most magnificent music and he is a devoted and loving husband and father. I am so blessed!"
Author: Didi Conn

14. "My son writes songs and plays. He sings like an angel."
Author: Edie Brickell

15. "He is smitten on the brain, -he reads and writes verses! I caught him in the act! Fools might say he was inspired; but I know it is the first and worst symptom of lunacy. All other maniacs have lucid intervals; some are curable; but the madness of poets, dogs, and musicians, is past hope. Earth possesses no remedy, science no cure."
Author: Edward John Trelawny

16. "One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of the individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye."
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

17. "I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays, I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play."
Author: Gary Burton

18. "Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold."
Author: Gaston Bachelard

19. "Miles Davis is one who writes songs when he plays."
Author: Gerry Mulligan

20. "For when the One Great Scorer comesTo mark against your name,He writes - not that you won or lost -But HOW you played the Game."Alumnus Football"
Author: Grantland Rice

21. "A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader."
Author: Guillermo Cabrera Infante

22. "To want to give to prose the rhythm of verse (but keeping it very much prose), and to want to write about ordinary life as one writes history or the epic (without denaturing the subject) is perhaps an absurdity. That's what I wonder sometimes. But perhaps it's also a grand undertaking and very original!"
Author: Gustav Flaubert

23. "Lady Gregory, in a note to her play Aristotle's Bellows, writes: Aristotle's name is a part of our folklore. The wife of one of our labourers told me one day as a bee buzzed through the open door, "Aristotle of the Books was very wise, but the bees got the best of him in the end. He wanted to know how they did pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and thought he would watch them, but when he put his eye to the glass, they had covered it with wax, so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed until then. The bees beat him that time surely."
Author: Hilda M. Ransome

24. "We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone."
Author: Iain Reid

25. "Knut, this is Jude. Remember I told you about him? He writes poetry." Knut looked my half-Japanese self up and down. "Haiku?" he guessed. "Gesundheit," I muttered sourly."
Author: J.L. Merrow

26. "I am still shocking people today, and I don't know why. Is it because I'm a woman talking about sex and men? One magazine said that no one writes sex in the back of a Bentley better than Jackie Collins."
Author: Jackie Collins

27. "I was thinking of applying to the 'Guardian' for a job after university. Yeah, I wanted to be one of the people who writes stories in G2."
Author: Jamie Cullum

28. "An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn't matter if you're a kid or if you're a grown-up, it doesn't matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend."
Author: Jarrett J. Krosoczka

29. "Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don't originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don't know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases. - From "Why She Writes"
Author: Jayne Anne Phillips

30. "Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early twenty-first century, we do not know what normal birth is.' Most practicing obstetricians have never witnessed an unplugged birth that wasn't an accident. Women are even beginning to deny normal birth to themselves: if 'normal' means being induced, immobilized by wires and tubes, sped up with drugs, all the while knowing that there's a good chance of surgery, well, might as well just cut to the chase, so to speak. 'Just give me a cesarean,' some are saying. And who can blame them? They want to avoid what they think of as normal birth."
Author: Jennifer Block

31. "I am not much engaged by the problems of what you might call our day but I am burdened by the particular, the mad person who writes me a letter. It is no longer necessary for them even to write me. I know when someone is thinking of me. I learn to deal with this."
Author: Joan Didion

32. "He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work."
Author: Kenneth W. Harl

33. "Imagine there is a bank account that credits your account each morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to used during the day. What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course? Each of us has such a bank, it's name is time. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a lost, whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against "tomorrow". You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and health. The clock is running. Make the most of today."
Author: Marc Levy

34. "God, the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious favor."
Author: Marisha Pessl

35. "Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you."
Author: Mark Oliver Everett

36. "I learn the lines that JK Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them."
Author: Michael Gambon

37. "Neil Hamburger writes such cutting jokes."
Author: Natasha Leggero

38. "They are filled with earnest nonsense, the sort of things that a boy writes to his sweetheart, but which somehow, when they are meant for you, never feel tired or cliched or anything other than absolutely tender and true."
Author: Natasha Solomons

39. "She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark."
Author: Neil Gaiman

40. "Never have I trusted Fortune,' writes Seneca, 'even when she seemed to be at peace. All her generous bounties - money, office, influence - I deposited where she could ask for them back without disturbing me."
Author: Oliver Burkeman

41. "If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility."
Author: Paul Graham

42. "Within five minutes of leaving the reunion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness - blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar - I'd loved since childhood, perhaps I'd find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized "the savour of the little madeleine": the apprehensiveness of death. "A mere taste," Proust writes, and "the word 'death' ... [has] ... no meaning for him." So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat, but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel's luck."
Author: Philip Roth

43. "Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view."
Author: Richard Russo

44. "And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?"
Author: Siri Hustvedt

45. "Has he written to you?''He writes frequently.''Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature."
Author: Stendhal

46. "In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward."
Author: Terri Windling

47. "He gives me all his numbers and writes mine down on a tram ticket. I am listening hard, but he doesn't say "I'll call you."
Author: Toni Jordan

48. "Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill."
Author: William Ernest Henley

49. "Who writes poetry imbibes honey from the poisoned lips of life."
Author: William Rose Benet

50. "Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the "creative moment." I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke..."
Author: Zadie Smith

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