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Quotes About Writing

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.
~ Helene Cixous
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
~ Helene Cixous
What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart....
~ Heloise
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
~ H.L. Mencken
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
~ H.L. Mencken
I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved, which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
~ H.L. Mencken
An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.
~ H.L. Mencken
No writer, in truth, is ever really a free agent. What he does in his trade is determined not only by his immediate environment and the ideational currents of his time, but also and more especially by the play of inherited forces and predispositions within him.
~ H.L. Mencken
I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin. I have not written and published to please other people but to satisfy myself, just as cow gives milk, not to profit the dairyman but to satisfy herself.
~ H.L.Mencken
For the purpose of securing epithets at once accurate and felicitous, the young author should familiarize himself thoroughly with the general aspect and phenomena of Nature, as well as with the ideas and associations which these things produce in the human mind.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
I sometimes write stories. I sometimes read them. Thank you. Stories in general—not yours.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Religion is at the core of a lot of Lovecraft's writing. Many of his stories focus around deities, sometimes taking on the role of aliens who are worshipped by humans as deities, who are either indifferent or actively hostile to humans. This is all particularly interesting as Lovecraft marked himself as either atheist or agnostic during his life.
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Wisdom is in books,... quote by me Halina Lagarde . Dan Brown is an inspiration to a book I am writing.
~ Halina Lagarde
To write a book, we must write with our whole life, not just during the moments we are sitting at our desk. When writing a book or an article, we know that our words will affect many other people. We do not have the right just to express our own suffering if it brings suffering to others.
~ Hanh Nhat Thich
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 Khureshi
The madness of writing was the antidote to true madness.
~ Hanif Kureishi
A few words of criticism and I can bear a grudge for three days at a time, convinced she is plotting against me. None of this has diminished despite years of self-analysis, therapy and "writing as healing", as some of my students used to call the attempt to make at. Nothing has cured me of myself, of the self I cling to. If you asked me, I would probably say that my problems are myself; my life is my dilemmas. I'd better enjoy them, then.
~ Hanif Kureishi
Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and poofs read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write a memoir. The game's up.
~ Hanif Kureishi
My blackness is spreading, Alice. I've been seeing and hearing things that can't be there or anywhere. At night, when I'm not hallucinating mad women, I can feel depression starting to burn me around the edges. If I sink into it, I'll have to give this thing up and write a novel.
~ Hanif Kureishi
Harry leaned forward. "You put your penis on the page.
~ Hanif Kureishi
Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself.
~ Hanif Kureishi
pois é óbvio que, por mais que um pensador se preocupe com a eternidade, no instante em que se dispõe a escrever os seus pensamentos deixa de estar fundamentalmente preocupado com a eternidade e volta sua atenção para a tarefa de legar aos pósteros algum vestígio deles. p28
~ Hannah Arendt