Quotes about Writing: Food for Thought
Here are some great quotes about writing, the creative process, or the writing life.
My favorites are on this page.
1. “Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like
paté.”—Margaret Atwood
2. “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead” -W.H. Auden
3. "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." —Charles
Bukowski
4. “If I don’t write to empty my mind I go mad.” —Lord Byron
5. “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry: that is,
prose, words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order” –Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
6. "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."—Robert Frost
7. “It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar
vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose.
Society has already told us that poetry is dead.” –Dana Gioia
8. “A ‘famous’ poet now means someone famous only to other poets.” –Dana Gioia
9. “There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.” —Robert Graves
10. “It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.” —Robert Hass
11. "Write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after."
—Ernest Hemingway
12. “…you can kill characters only once, but you can hurt them every day.”—Neil LaBute
13. “Why not say what happened?"—Robert Lowell
14. “What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.” —Logan Pearsall Smith
15. “Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” —Red Smith
16. “There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough." -William
Stafford
17. Substitute 'damn' every time you are inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be
just as it should be."—Mark Twain
18. “This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.” — Oscar Wilde
19. "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found
there."—William Carlos Williams
20. “Confront the dark parts of yourself.... Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels
to sing."—August Wilson
21. “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free…The more constraints one
imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle to spirit.” -Igor Stravinsky
22. "I always write from my own experiences whether I've had them or not."—Ron Carlson
23. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway
24. “I only write when I feel the inspiration. Fortunately, inspiration strikes at 10:00 o’clock every day.”
—William Faulkner
25. “If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
26. “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a
mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.” —Winston Churchill
27. “There are three rules to writing a novel and nobody knows what they are." —Wm. Somerset
Maugham
28. “We put on our stories before our clothes….” —William Wenthe
29. “All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath." —F. Scott Fitzgerald
30. "All I am is the trick of words writing themselves." —Anne Sexton
31. "You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."—Richard Hugo
32. “Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let
me sleep.”—Franz Kafka
33. "When one is highly alert to language, then nearly everything begs to be a poem..."—James Tate
34. "Remember the old adage about how an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of
typewriters will eventually type something beautiful? Well, the Internet disproves that."—Kurt
Vonnegut
35. "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."—Ray Bradbury
36. "The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn't exist with tools you
have to invent on the spot."—George Saunders
37. "Any writer who knows what he's doing isn't doing very much."—Nelson Algren
38. "The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."—Barry Hannah
39. "Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."—Walter
Benjamin
40. "Writing isn't about applause. It's about humiliation."—Steve Almond
41. “A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime
has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
42. "Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener.
There has to be this transfer of energy."—Muriel Rukeyser
43. "Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel
relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it." —Joy Williams
44. "A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”—James Dickey
45. "Poets think they are pitchers, but they are really catchers." —Jack Spicer
46. "As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose."—Rilke
47. "Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever
so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."—Virginia Woolf
48. "My weakness and my absurdity is I must write at all costs and express myself."— Antonin Artaud
49. "Poetry is mostly hunches." —John Ashberry
50. "Always pull back—and see how silly we must look to God." —Jack Kerouac
51. "Writing should be done on your knees."—William Maxwell
52. "Use the right word and not its second cousin." —Mark Twain
53. If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks
regularly” –Andrew Harvey
54. "Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard."—Anne Sexton
55. “The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman…A person is a fool to
become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.” —Roald Dahl
56. “Go forth my book and help to destroy the world as it is.” — Russell Banks
57. “Art is long, and life is short, and success is very far off.”—Anton Checkov
58. "I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is grace in territory
held largely by the devil." —Flannery O'Connor
59. “Not every poem can sing like a drunk man, but it sure better swing punches."—H.D Dinken
60. "Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."—Anne Sexton
61. “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his
attention.”—Lisa Kerr
62. “Perhaps I'm inventing a little, perhaps embellishing, but on the whole that's the way it was.”
—Samuel Beckett
63. "If you can bring nothing to this place but your carcass, keep out."—William Carlos Williams
64. “If we don’t use these words, who the hell will?” W.H. Auden
65. “It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things” –
Stéphane Mallarmé
66. “[Poetry is the art in which one being calls out to, whispers to, sings to, one other being, in the most
intimate way. Our species needs it, perhaps, to survive” -Sharon Olds
Excerpts from Dana Gioia’s essay, “Can Poetry Matter?”
“I have never considered poetry an intrinsically difficult art whose mysteries can be appreciated only by
a trained intellectual elite. Poetry is an art—like painting or jazz, opera or drama—whose pleasures are
generally open to any intelligent person with the inclination to savor them” (Gioia xvii).
“While it is a critic’s task to analyze a literary work, the reader needs only to experience it” (Gioia xvii).
“By the common reader, however, I did not imagine an uninformed or unreflective individual. Nor did I
assume the idea of the incurious mass audience of the popular media” (Gioia xviii).
“American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and
intellectual life, it can become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little
of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class, poets are not
without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual
prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible” (Gioia 1).
“But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon” (Gioia. 2).
“Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly
focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt
Russell Jacoby’s definition of a contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a
“famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets” (Gioia 2).
“The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none
of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other
poets” (Gioia 3).
“Usually the less a critic knows about verse the more readily he or she dismisses it” (Gioia. 5).
“Though supported by a loyal coterie, poetry has lost the confidence that it speaks to and for the
general culture” (Gioia. 5).
“Today most readings are celebrations less of poetry than of the author’s ego. No wonder the audience
for such events usually consists entirely of poets, would-be poets, and friends of the author” (Gioia 5).
“But most poetry is published in journals that address an insular audience of literary professionals,
mainly teachers of creative writing and their students. A few of these, such as American Poetry Review
and AWP Chronicle, have moderately large circulations. Many more have negligible readerships. But
size is not the problem. The problem is their complacency is resignation about existing only in and
for a subculture” (Gioia 6).
“The unspoken editorial rule seems to be, Never surprise or annoy the readers; they are, after all, mainly
our friends and colleagues” (Gioia 7).
“It is time to experiment, time to leave the well-ordered but stuffy classroom, time to restore a vulgar
vitality to poetry and unleash the energy now trapped in the subculture. There is nothing to lose. Society
has already told us that poetry is dead” (Gioia 21).