Discursive Writing Quotes

#1. Boys,
I'm probably sleeping, but hopefully y'all got up on time. You need to be down at the factory by 9. Ask for Zeke.I listened to your interview with Starnes-it's good work, but I've changed my mind about some things.
At six hours per person, we'll never get through the whole town. I'd like you only to ask the following four questions: Where would you live if you could live anywhere? What would you do for a living if you didn't work for the factory? When did your people come to the country? And What do you think makes Gutshot special? I think that'll move things along nicely. They're expecting you at the factory. Lindsey will accompany you.
See you tonight.Hollis.
PS.I'm writing this note at 5:30., SO don't wake me up. #Quote by John Green

#2. Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history. #Quote by Samuel P. Huntington

#3. . . .In a heartbeat, you will fall right into that novel, that poem, the story that you are most in love with right now. When you learn to be able to decide in the moment to take breaks from your internal voices - even though it's only for a split second - you will be taking your first baby steps toward the full-out exhilaration of living in the midst of the wholly realized writer's life.

Then all the negatives - yes, even your cherished writer's block ego trip - will fade into background noise, then you will find silence, and your story will take over. Before you know it, you will be working calmly and clearly for hours, rather than for a couple minutes.

1 hour, not 1 second, 2 hours, not 2 seconds, 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours of allowing your mind to come to rest from the horrid, every day, mental chatter we lock ourselves up with - a time to anchor within the natural spaciousness that you already know instinctively, know from deep within will make you feel full inside. . . . #Quote by Terry Kennedy

#4. You might learn as much about how to write by reading Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Chandler, Saul Bellow, Paul Muldoon or a hundred other good novelists or poets than by seeing another round of John Ford revivals. #Quote by David Denby

#5. Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day. #Quote by Dan Alatorre

#6. Authorship of any sort is a fantastic indulgence of the ego. #Quote by John Kenneth Galbraith

#7. All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers . If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants. #Quote by William Cobbett

#8. Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections. #Quote by Virginia Woolf

#9. Yet there was no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified to be President of all the people. Few, if any Americans could match the breadth of his intellect and the strength of his character. A random survey of his achievements might show him mastering German, French, and the contrasted dialects of Harvard and Dakota Territory; assembling fossil skeletons with paleontological skill; fighting for an amateur boxing championship; transcribing birdsong into a private system of phonetics; chasing boat thieves with a star on his breast and Tolstoy in his pocket; founding a finance club, a stockmen's association, and a hunting-conservation society; reading some twenty thousand books and writing fifteen of his own; climbing the Matterhorn; promulgating a flying machine; and becoming a world authority on North American game mammals. If the sum of all these facets of experience added up to more than a geometric whole - implying excess construction somewhere, planes piling upon planes - then only he, presumably, could view the polygon entire. #Quote by Edmund Morris

#10. People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush. #Quote by Li-Young Lee

#11. The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way. #Quote by Richard Harding Davis

#12. It's not publishing that matters; it's not writing that matters. What matters is feeling alive while writing, washing dishes, driving, etc. Writing just gives you a solid place to land some of that God energy that is already within you. #Quote by Barbara Robinette Moss

#13. If my twelve-year-old self, of whom I had grown rather fond, thinking about him, were to reproach me: 'Why have you grown up such a dull dog, when I gave you such a good start? Why have you spent your time in dusty libraries, catologuing other people's books instead of writing your own? What had become of the Ram, the Bull and the Lion, the example I gave you to emulate? Where above all is the Virgin, with her shining face and curling tresses, whom I entrusted to you'- what should I say?

I should have an answer ready. 'Well, it was you who let me down, and I will tell you how. You flew too near to the sun, and you were scorched. This cindery creature is what you made me.'

To which he might reply: 'But you have had half a century to get over it! Half a century, half the twentieth century, that glorious epoch, that golden age that I bequeathed to you!'

'Has the twentieth century,' I should ask, 'done so much better than I have? When you leave this room, which I admit is dull and cheerless, and take the last bus to your home in the past, if you haven't missed it - ask yourself whether you found everything so radiant as you imagined it. Ask yourself whether it has fulfilled your hopes. You were vanquished, Colston, you were vanquished, and so was your century, your precious century that you hoped so much of. #Quote by L.P. Hartley

#14. The moment when I am no longer more than a writer, I will cease to write. #Quote by Albert Camus

#15. Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. #Quote by Pankaj Mishra

#16. 'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times. #Quote by Lauren Willig

#17. I have a little piece of advice for all the single guys out there, this is a piece of gold so please write this down. If you have the opportunity to star in a movie, do it. Seriously, I find it's a lot easier to meet girls. #Quote by Vince Vaughn

#18. Do you know what every instructor in the world wants from you? He or she really, really wants you to do two things: Demonstrate that you have understood the course material and write intelligently about your subject. #Quote by Scribendi

#19. I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching. #Quote by Thomas P. Campbell

#20. My creative process involves reading books and magazines, writing outside, and moving around a lot. I like to pace around when I'm writing songs. #Quote by Judith Hill

#21. I like to think I've written something worth reading when I cry the tears of the characters. #Quote by Carla H. Krueger

#22. Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself. #Quote by Charles Bukowski

#23. The earliest discussion of the authorship of Luke and Acts is from Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in Gaul, writing in the late second century. He attributes the books to Luke, the coworker of Paul, and notes that the occurrence of the first-person narrative ("we") throughout the later chapters of Acts (starting at 16:10) indicates that the author of Acts was a companion of Paul and present with him on these occasions. These "we" passages in Acts are the key to the authorship of both Acts and the Gospel of Luke. #Quote by Anonymous

#24. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. #Quote by Graham Greene

#25. If a 25-year old can't read and write and he or she isn't gaining marketable skills, it doesn't matter if a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House. His or her future will be bleak. #Quote by J. C. Watts

#26. When I'm not writing or working on books as a publisher, I'm doing things that make me happy. One is skiing with my kids and husband. I love sports. #Quote by Andrea Davis Pinkney

#27. Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice. #Quote by Shannon Hale

#28. When it's time to settle into the serial monogamy inherent in writing a book (although, between you and me, I secretly practice biblio-polygamy - I can't help myself), #Quote by Cathleen Rountree

#29. Rohini Mohan read. While she did, I sketched her. She writes with such beauty and violence, and it seemed like the best way to listen was to really watch her, in the way that only drawing someone lets me do. #Quote by Molly Crabapple

#30. People ask me: "Why do you write about food, and eating, and drinking? Why don't you write about the struggle for power and security, and about love, the way the others do?" ... The easiest answer is to say that, like most other humans, I am hungry. #Quote by M.F.K. Fisher

#31. I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things. When I don't know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. #Quote by Taylor Swift

#32. And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss
and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces. #Quote by Richard Ford

#33. What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier. #Quote by Kiefer Sutherland

#34. I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things. #Quote by Brian Regan

#35. The recording process was basically me meeting with different writers, going into their studio, starting a song and just hanging out and chatting and getting to know how they work. Everybody has a different writing process so there was a lot of getting to know people, which can be fun and stressful at the same time. #Quote by Bridgit Mendler

#36. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like. #Quote by Jennifer Fallon

#37. I was 37 years old. I wanted to support myself by writing. #Quote by Judith Rossner

#38. (on teaching writing)
So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the more relevant questions of 'why am I writing' and 'what am I saying' and 'how do I keep it honest. #Quote by Celine Kiernan

#39. Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. #Quote by Haruki Murakami

#40. Not everyone gets to do what they love, be good at it, and get paid for it. If you do, you're lucky. #Quote by Britt Holewinski