Quotes & Sayings About Thoughts And Writing

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

For me, it's important that I experience and feel what the characters are feeling. So I put myself in those moments, in their thoughts, and let it happen naturally. I write what I feel. — Chevy Stevens

If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life
whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours. — Don Roff

The State of the Union has become, under presidents of both parties, a political pep rally degrading to everyone. The judiciary and uniformed military should never attend. And Congress, by hosting a spectacle so monarchical in structure (which is why Thomas Jefferson sent his thoughts to Congress in writing) deepens the diminishment of the legislative branch as a mostly reactive servant of an overbearing executive. — George F. Will

He leaned against the writing desk and stayed there till nightfall, lost in sorrowful thoughts. After all, she had loved him. — Gustave Flaubert

Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it. — S.A. Tawks

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world. — Leslie Marmon Silko

I don't just sit down and write all day, or the songs would be weird or stupid. They would be about different stupid thoughts that I go through. — Syleena Johnson

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. — Leon Uris

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow. — Spencer Gordon

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. — Susan B. Anthony

Who cares what a man's style is, so it is intelligible,
as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no more than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock's feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts. — Henry David Thoreau

Writing a manual forces you to place your thoughts and ideas down on paper. — Tara VanDerveer

Sometimes you control your demons and sometimes it controls you. — J. Limbu

The little box that was given to me was by no means unique. I'd heard of prayer boxes, and I knew what they were for.
... Any scrap of paper will do, anywhere, anytime of the day or night. The important part, in a world of fractured thoughts, hurried moments, and scattershot prayers, is to take the time to think through, to write down, to clarify in your own mind the things you're asking for, the things you're grateful for, the things your're troubled about, the hopes you've been nurturing.
And then?
Put them in the box and ...
Let. Them. Go.
That's what trust is. It's letting go of the worry. It's the way of peace and also the way of God. such a hard road to travel for people like me, who are worriers. When I'm writing a story, I control the whole universe. In life ... not so much. Actually, not at all. Things happen that I hadn't anticipated and wouldn't choose and can't change. That's the tough part. — Lisa Wingate

Writing's much more romantic when its pen and ink and paper. It's... More timeless. and worthwhile. Think about it. There are so many words gushing out into the universe these days. All digitally. All in Comic Sans or Times New Roman. Silly Websites. Stupid news stories digitally uploaded to a 24-hour channel. Where's all this writing going? Who's keeping a note of it all? Who's in charge of deciding what's worthwhile and what isn't? But back then... Back then, if someone wanted to write something they had to buy paper. Buy it! And ink. And a pen. And they couldn't waste too many sheets cos it was expensive. So when people wrote, they wrote because it was worthwhile... not just because they had some half-baked idea and they wanted to pointlessly prove their existence by sharing it on some bloody social networking site. — Holly Bourne

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations
all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down. — Henri Frederic Amiel

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened. — Criss Jami

Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow's-foot seams.
Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
— Paulette Jiles

The act of writing, when it goes well, gives me a pleasure, a joy, unlike any other. It takes me to another place - irrespective of my subject - where I am totally absorbed and oblivious to distracting thoughts, worries, preoccupations, or indeed the passage of time. In those rare, heavenly states of mind, I may write nonstop until I can no longer see the paper. Only then do I realize that evening has come and that I have been writing all day. Over a lifetime, I have written millions of words, but the act of writing seems as fresh, and as much fun, as when I started it nearly seventy years ago. — Oliver Sacks

Reading all my old love letters was disorienting. You remember thinking the thoughts and writing the words but, man, you can't TOUCH those feelings. Its like they belonged to someone else. Someone you don't even know. I'm aware, in an intellectual way. That I felt all those things about him, but this emotions are far away now.
What's so strange to me is that I can't even force my heart back to that place where I felt that all consuming passion. That makes me feel distant from myself. Who WAS I then? Will I ever be able to get back to that place? Reading the letters again made me wonder: Which is the real me? The one who saw the world in that emotionally saturated way, or the me who sees it the way I do now? — Bill Shapiro

The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as being negative or harmful before they become a part of your being, before they become some kind of action like writing an angry letter to someone or speaking too strongly to someone. — Pankaj Mishra

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. — Herman Melville

To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others — Samuel Johnson

Cooking up ideas and crafting good plot into a unique, natural, stirring taste is like cooking patiently in a charcoal stove. — Angelica Hopes

I came up professionally as a lawyer, and when you're a lawyer, writing a 50-page brief in one night is just another day at the office. You learn to make choices really quickly, and you learn how to get thoughts down very quickly. — Marc Guggenheim

When writing my Leg book, I drew heavily on the detailed journals I had kept as a patient in 1974. Oaxaca Journal, too, relied heavily on my handwritten notebooks. But for the most part, I rarely look at the journals I have kept for the greater part of a lifetime. The act of writing is itself enough; it serves to clarify my thoughts and feelings. The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing. — Oliver Sacks

When I'm writing from a character's viewpoint, in essence I become that character; I share their thoughts, I see the world through their eyes and try to feel everything they feel. — George R R Martin

So I wanted to write a play that put some thoughts and feelings in the air about the miracle and the mystery and that alluded to deep and unknown forces. But then really just have people going to the store and fixing the sink and going through the normal things of looking for love and getting up in the morning. Because that's how we live. — Will Eno

Putting thoughts into words is vastly different from putting truth into words. For words are not truth. As ardently as writers sort and select and polish their words, at the end of the day they are still words. They are not, in themselves, truth. However carefully we choose our words, no matter how eloquently we compile and conjoin and convey them, they remain just words, merely signposts that point to the truth, as Eckhart Tolle put it. Just as preachers, politicians, PR spin masters and the media can't create truth by writing or speaking words they say are true, authors can't validate truth by putting it into print. And the rest of us can't know it by simply hearing or reading the words. We can only find our way to truth by following the signposts and ultimately believing. It all comes down to believing, to faith, for there is no proof this side of the big dirt nap. — Lionel Fisher

Stop it now and take control. Write this on a card and pin it up where you can see it ... MY THOUGHTS CONTROL MY LIFE! — Peter A. Cohen

Stories have their own kind of truth," I pointed out. "And there's not much story if you don't make things up. I mean, you can't be a writer and just write about real life."
"Why not?" Luke snapped a twig.
I was amazed he even had to ask. "Because real life's only bearable if you don't have to live in it all the time. — K.M. Grant

When I am at peace with myself ... then thoughts flow into me most easily and at their best. Where they come from and how - that I cannot say ... I'd be willing to work forever and forever if I were permitted to write only such music as I want to write and can write - which I myself think good. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

As a journalist you have to think quickly, you're exposed to all types of people and situations and you've got to synthesize your thoughts in a very clear and concise way and write them down quickly. Those were all things that have proven really useful in my life as a television writer. — Frank Spotnitz

The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what you mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel. — Natalie Goldberg

Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face. — Guy Kawasaki

Yet the scene around me had its influence, and a guilty feeling possessed me as I realized that of all present in that place of peace and clean content, I was the only profane thing, an ogre lurking to destroy. The half-grown ferns and evergreen sedge grasses through which the early breeze whispered, would, if I had my way, soon be smeared with the blood of some animal, who was viewing, perhaps with feelings akin to my own, the dawning of another day; to be is last. Strange thoughts, maybe, coming from a trapper, one whose trade is to kill;but be it known to you that he who lives much alone within the portals of the temple of Nature learns to think, and deeply, of things which seldom come within the scope of ordinary life. Much Killing brings ine time, no longer triumph, but a revulsion of feeling. — Grey Owl

Writers live with fear. Some writers cannot deal with the fear, and so they quit or refuse to publish. In order to write, you must either ignore the fear or trick it into leaving you alone. The fear is very sly, though and hard to trick. The fear in writing comes from exposing your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences, your ideas, your talent, your intelligence and ultimately your self to public scrutiny and possible scorn. The fear is by no means groundless. You have opened yourself up to the possibility of public humiliations...I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest novel ever written isn't gathering dust in some filing cabinet somewhere, simply because its author could not overcome the fear of having it published. — Patrick F. McManus

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access. — Carol Windley

Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art. — Markham Shaw Pyle

Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it is composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness. — Walter J. Ong

I really like to travel when I write. Something about seeing new things and being in new cultures and environments provokes new thoughts in your head. — Josh Radnor

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. — Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like ... What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result? — Sonja Lyubomirsky

Like a bird, my thoughts were flying away so I became a writer to cage my thoughts with paper and pen. You should not call me a writer but rather a catcher of thoughts. — Debasish Mridha

Why am I holding on to this stuff? Some of this junk is losing its punch. Pictures. Pieces of paper with writing on them - I can no longer connect with the thoughts or feelings that birthed them, that drove me in that panicky desperate moment to scribble in a barely legible scrawl as if on a cave wall. All say the same thing in some form or another: "I am here. This is me in this moment." Do I have some fantasy that this stuff will be important after I die? Do I think that scholars will be thrilled that I left such a disorganized treasure trove of creative evidence of me? Will the archives be fought over by college libraries? What will probably happen is my brother will come out with my mother and look in the boxes. My mother will hold up a VHS or a cassette and say to my brother, "Do I have a machine that plays these?" My brother will shake his head no and they will throw it all away. — Marc Maron

One thing about having mostly absent parents that I think was perhaps "good" for the development of my intellect/writing is that I was given almost total freedom to read/write/look at whatever I wanted. I wonder a lot about how my past experiences, particularly my negative childhood (home life and being severely bullied/ostracized throughout school) as formed my/my thoughts/my writing, though I should also note those things were far from the only thing that had an impact on me/my writing. — Marie Calloway

Always write exactly what you're feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work ... make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it ... just put your heart and soul into all that you do ... then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel. -Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject. — William Blaikie

Old texts, myths, and religions have always fascinated me, though I prefer learning about them to writing papers and trying to make thoughts and arguments regarding their effect or meaning - this being the essence of my time in religious studies. — Tom Shields

The long nub end of afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind, The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she'd taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. — Pat Conroy

When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. Filling pages and people with inspiration. When my thoughts don't want to rest on a page, we argue. We argue that one merely is ready just too comfortable playing in The Nile [denial] river. So we compromise. We grow,
water metaphors
and plant simile trees
of golden-almond
manifested love dreams.
Then at that moment, we forgot what we were arguing about.
Beauty can do that for you.
That's the beauty of writing. — Antonia Perdu

I have hundreds of Word documents filled with pages of one-liners. If I begin to write a story, or if one of my thoughts leads to more than a couple paragraphs of writing, I'll go into these documents and pull out lines that I think would work with it. — Chelsea Martin

I find myself often moved to tears by what is being written in front of me. Sometimes, I just sit on the couch and write the words down and cry because the beauty of the thoughts and how exquisitely they are being expressed. — Neale Donald Walsch

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children - you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it. — Sahara Sanders

In flight from intellectual heaviness, [he] arrives at intelligent weightlessness. Every notion is flipped this way and that; the answer to every question is yes and no; the proliferating examples from all the arts ... overwhelm the observations that they are designed to illustrate; the general impression in one of uncontrollable articulateness. [He] does not think his thoughts; he convenes them. There is not a sign of struggle anywhere. — Leon Wieseltier

May I suggest that you write, that you keep journals, that you express your thoughts on paper. Writing is a great discipline. It is a tremendous educational effort. It will assist you in various ways, and you will bless the lives of many-your families and others-now and in the years to come, as you put on paper some of your experiences and some of your musings. — Gordon B. Hinckley

I do have a journal, that I write all my thoughts in every day. So that's kind of something. I also have a burn box where I write secrets down and put it in a box. — Miranda Cosgrove

I'd love to write some porn, but I don't know if I have the right engines. When I was a young man and I was tempted to write porn, imaginary parents would appear over my shoulder and read what I was writing; just about the point that I managed to banish the imaginary parents, real children would lean over my shoulder and read what I was writing. — Neil Gaiman

Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written. — Michael Chabon

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight. — Warren Buffett

If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain. — Jorge Luis Borges

It's entirely possible to get to know someone without actually seeing them in person. In fact, it's better like that because none of the superficial stuff gets in the way. You really get to know a person. And it's easier to express yourself when you're writing things down. At least it is for me. I like to order my thoughts, and delete them if they don't make any sense. You can't do that in real life. — Cat Clarke

Here's the thing - in this damned century, you'll meet a lot of people who do a lot of things. What's funny is the fact that the most desirable attributes of these people are nothing but developed and cultured thoughts. And these things come naturally to people who shine bright. The other guys just try to ape these thoughts, in an embarrassing attempt to recreate some of that magic. Sadly,- what looks beautiful as a natural quotient can be extremely funny and disgusting when replicated manually. Stop replicating feelings; else you'll turn into one of those duplicate personalities. They're wannabes. You don't have to become one! — Shomprakash Sinha Roy

If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies. — Allan W. Eckert

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... — George Orwell

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts. — William Safire

The problem with me is that I cannot focus when she is on my mind. I can't. I probably will make a mistake when writing that paper and will start writing everything I feel about her - the professor will be very happy with that, I am sure. Oh well, such is my life. I guess I've been attempting my best to forget her for several weeks now. But even in that act of forgetting her, I am remembering her. I am recollecting her and recreating her in my mind. And that's where everything falls apart. In remembering her, I remember her goodness. In remembering her, I remember her weaknesses and my own. In remembering her, I am remembering myself. Out of that dark cave of mine, I call myself out. And then all of the remembering starts again. I doodle, I twitch, I aim restlessly for some unseen goal. And then my thoughts drift to you.
I'll let them stay there for now. Just for a minute.
Or two. — Moses Y. Mikheyev

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, woman as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn't just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world.' Jean Baudrillard, — Philip K. Dick

Good writing ... involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. — Pat Conroy

Thoughts are real', he said. 'Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren't aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that's what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future'. — Paul Auster

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings. — James Joyce

I've tried every which way for writing lyrics - everything from using really bizarre imagery and metaphors, sort of obscuring the facts of what I'm singing about, all the way over to a song like 'Losing My Mind,' where you're just reading my thoughts as they're occurring. — Rivers Cuomo

After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journaling is the single most effective tool you may ever find for deeper intimacy with Father God and Jesus. It is a heart-to-heart method of communication with God. For you see, it is God's desire to intimately commune with you and to have you intimately commune with Him. Journaling facilitates this heart-to-heart communion - it is simply listening to each other's heart and writing it down.
Journaling helps you hear God's voice. God is speaking to you most of the time. Often you do not differentiate His voice from your own thoughts and therefore do not realize you are actually hearing God's voice. If you can learn to clearly discern His voice speaking within you, you have found the font of intimacy - the heart of God speaking to you. — Linda Boone

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. — Henry David Thoreau

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I ... clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work. — Judith Barrington

If an author be supposed to involve his thoughts in voluntary obscurity, and to obstruct, by unnecessary difficulties, a mind eager in the pursuit of truth; if he writes not to make others learned, but to boast the learning which he possesses himself, and wishes to be admired rather than understood, he counteracts the first end of writing, and justly suffers the utmost severity of censure, or the more afflicting severity of neglect. — Samuel Johnson

Art translates human souls. Each passing eon's public display of sophisticated hieroglyphics cast a unique depiction upon the rudimentary art of survival. Humankind cannot exist without the makeshift paradigm of innovative art, which genuine amoeba expresses elusive and unsayable thoughts. Humankind's gallery of artistic impressions ranges from the starkness of personified cave drawings to the free ranging lexis of modern art. Collection of multihued stories of the ages portrays the vivid panoply of enigmatic vitas etched by humankind's self-imposed sense of urgency. Each passing generation's effusion of trope offerings seamlessly folds its shared renderings into the shimmering panorama of the cosmos, the sparkling nightscape that houses the intangible life force all communal souls. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I like to work from home. I do most of my writing in bed, late at night after everyone has gone to sleep. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and late at night is about the only time that can actually happen. — Donald Driver

Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer's use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader's malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Reading the book now means that one can, if one wants, play Fantasy Literature
match writers off against each other and see who won over the long haul. Faulkner or Henry Green? I reckon the surprise champ was P.G. Wodehouse, as elegant and resourceful a prose stylist as anyone held up for our inspection here ... he has turned out to be as enduring as anyone apart from Orwell. Jokes, you see. People do like jokes.
(Hornby's thoughts after reading "Enemies of Promise" by Cyril Connolly) — Nick Hornby

He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones. — Anais Nin

It is unclear how much longer people will write on dried and flattened wood. Trees do so much for humans and for our planet that it hardly seems fair to ask them to carry our thoughts as well. From Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within. — Michael Yarus

Write the words "The FIve Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing. — Dani Shapiro

How do I like to write? withe a soft pencil and a hard dick, not the other way round.
I like the paper of all kinds : creamy, white, yellow, thick, thin, lined, plain. In my cupboard I have at least fifty notebooks, each of which, at the time of purchase, filled me with excitement of what might be said of new thoughts discovered ... and then-nothing. — Hanif Kureishi

People take things a little too personal. I write these songs, and they're experiments with thoughts. That's it. I'm not a teacher. — Cass McCombs

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing. — Maya Angelou

When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts. — Susan B. Anthony

There is nothing to writing, all you have to do is, sit on the computer and bleed your thoughts. — Santosh Kalwar

The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows. — Anu Lal

I tend to like to write a song and then think about it for a while. I record a demo of it and then put it away and wait until I've gotten more thoughts on it or get sure exactly how to approach it. — Christopher Owens

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living. — Chloe Thurlow

My thoughts are with you all. Forever conscious of the vast, absurd universe and writing my eternal story I shall remain dead, but dreaming. — A.P. Sweet

Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. — Elena Ferrante

Whoever desires, for his writings or himself, what none can reasonably contemn, the favour of mankind, must add grace to strength, and make his thoughts agreeable as well as useful. Many complain of neglect who never tried to attract regard. — Samuel Johnson

I maybe many things to many people; but for me I am a writer; always have been and always will be.
I may not contribute to great literatures, but my contribution to writing would be always there; etched in the minds of the people whose lives I have touched with words.
Only a writer can understand what it means to a writer to not be able to be one.
To have the nib of pen broken ... like a death sentence ..
Or a life imprisonment in one's own mind without an outlet to thoughts.
I would give up things I love the most if that's the choice I am given to be able to be what I really want to be - A writer.
(C) Arti Honrao — Arti Honrao

When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather your own thoughts, write down ideas, observe people around you, and reflect on experiences. Working doesn't always mean putting words on paper. — Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Writing is praying with me. You know a child would look up at every sentence and say, 'And what shall I say next?' That is just what I do; I ask Him that at every line He would give me not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes. — Frances Ridley Havergal