Writing and Thinking

WRITING AND THINKING

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Buddha

The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Miguel de Cervantes

I don't pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.
Arthur C. Clarke

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Joan Cocteau

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton

I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian.
David Cronenberg

A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion

Consciousness will always be one degree above comprehensibility.
Gösta Carl Henrik Ehrensvärd

In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy.
Albert Einstein

Curiosity has its own reason for existence. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.
Jules Feifer

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
E. M. Forster

If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author.
Neil Gaiman

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.
Max Gropius

Writers seldom write the things they think. They simply write the things they think other folks think they think.
Elbert Hubbard

Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do - not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.
Stephen King

Authors who never give you something to disagree with never give you anything to think about.
Michael LaRocca

Stupidity is no excuse of not thinking.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

A man who is a genius and doesn't know it, probably isn't.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Genius is not a quality, but only a quantitative difference in a combination of attributes contained in all persons.
Dr. Ernst Jones

The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing.
Jean Malaquais

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
Anais Nin

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard Shaw

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Henry David Thoreau

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain

The brain that doesn't feed itself, eats itself.
Gore Vidal

Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.
Kurt Vonnegut

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
Tobias Wolff

Writing is thinking on paper.
William Zinsser