Famous Writers Quotes


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"A poem . . .
begins as a lump in the throat,
a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. . . .
It finds the thought
and the thought finds the words."

Robert Frost

"I write out of subjects.
I am experience - oriented, rather than word - oriented."

James Dickey

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

Anne Sexton

"Writing is far too hard work
to say what someone else wants me to.

Serving it as a craft,
using it as a way of growing
in my own understanding,
seems to me to be a beautiful way to live.

And if that product is shareable with other people,
so much the better.

That increases the joy in it."

Jane Rule

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection.
So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure
to do the impossible."

William Faulkner

"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.
The adventure is a metaphysical one;
it is a way of approaching life indirectly,
of acqiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe.

The writer lives
between the upper and lower worlds:
he takes the path
in order eventually to become that path himself."

Henry Miller

"Now and again thousands of memories
converge, harmonize,
arrange themselves around a central idea
in a coherent form,
and I write a story."

Katherine Anne Porter

"I started with all the handicaps,
incapabilities
and helplessness.
I didn't talk when I was twenty.
I taught myself by the act of writing."

Anais Nin

The total life of the writer
is the source of his work.

Paul Engle

"Once when I was working in a creativity worship in Iowa, an older woman wanted desperately to write poetry about her youth in rural corn country. I asked her what she used to do that she would like to write about. Among her answers was "husking corn". I told her to wait and I dashed out and bought a half dozen ears of corn in a supermarket. When I returned I had her sit as she used to and encouraged her to visualize the setting. With her eyes closed, and sitting as she remembered, I had her husk corn.

In less than ten minutes
she produced her first poem.

Within an hour
she had written nearly a dozen.

Bob Samples

"There are three points of view
from which a writer can be considered:
he may be considered as a story teller,
as a teacher, and as an enchanter.

A major writer combines these three -
storyteller, teacher, enchanter -
but it is the enchanter in him
that predominates and makes him
a major writer. (magic, story, lesson)

Vladimir Nabokov

You will write, she said,
if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result,
but think of the writing in terms of discovery,
which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper,
not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...
It will come if it is there and if you will let it come."

Gertrude Stein

"You ask whether your verses are good.
You ask me.
You have asked other before.
You send them to magazines.
You compare them with other poems,
and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts.

Now I beg you to give up all that.
You are looking outward,
and that, above all, you should not do now.

Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.
There is only one single way.
Go into yourself.
Seach for the reason that bids you write.
This above all, ask yourself
in the stillest hour of your night:
Must I write?"

Rainer Maria Rilke

Poems about Writing

The Artist and Writer as Rebel

Quotes on the Courage to Create

Famous Writers Quotes

On Being a Poet

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