Transformative Writing Quotes

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.

Poetry and prose can start a revolution, break walls, and ideas can build nations.

I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified-he makes the word new and thus the world.

It's a powerful thing to be able to write a song. Even the least powerful feeling - like insecurity - that makes you feel weak when you experience it, when you write about it, you are powerful.

Major writing is to say that which has been seen, so that it need never be said again; so that which has been seen increases, changes in reality, in being.

In ways I don't entirely have the words for, an experience, thought or a lesson isn't real for me until I've written down.

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

I think books can cure cancer and grow back hair. I can't say it enough. For me, that's why it's so syrupy. It's both syrupy and over the top, and overly sincere, and also dead true. What else can I tell you? A writer can't catch a cab half the time, but when there's a demagogue, when there's a government that wants to suppress, there's a reason that writers end up getting in trouble. It's such a subversive form that can really change people.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

What do I want from a book? Something protean, something always on-the-move-or-make - shape-shifting, semantically-and-syntactically-shifting.

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

Certainly the highest posthumous praise that can be conferred upon any writer is the assertion that his or her writing permanently altered the literary landscape for the better, opening new textual doors and engaging new readers. That the author's oeuvre was essential and irreplaceable and transformative.

Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.

To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people's minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world.

David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.

I can't write about nice, easy topics because that won't change the world. And I do want to change the world - one reader at a time.

Yes, for all of us in the Shakespeare Squadron, writing is just that: not an escape from reality, but an attempt to change reality.

A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.

I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.