Are you looking for inspirational quotes about writing? Inspiring Lizard has got you covered! In this article we present the 1001 most beautiful writing quotes we could find. Let’s get inspired!
Writing quotes
My favorite hobby is writing and recording songs at my studio. I like to surf, but I don’t get a chance to do that as much as I’d like. I don’t live close to the beach. I also like to ski, but I don’t get to do that much, either.
— Scott Weiland
The writing in itself is transformative for me.
— Sophia Rose, Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage
In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.
— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
I love writing Christmas stories, especially of the historical variety.
— Linda Lael Miller
Suddenly I’ve become so restless that I’m capable of saying “That is enough” and ending what I’m writing you, which is based mostly on blind words.
— Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life
Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard.
— Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope
It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can’t describe, you might just be, I don’t know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The future is completely open and so is the past. And we are writing them right now. Making a different past or future is only up to us now.
— Ana Claudia Antunes, A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
— Seth Godin
Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.
— Roy Blount, Jr.
I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
— Shannon Hale
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
— G.K. Chesterton, All Things Considered
What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.
— Harley King
A miracle is when you take action on your written goal, and create reality by working to make it happen. Transform your dreams to the material world by writing your goals, taking action and by being determined to make them happen.
— Mark F. LaMoure
Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.
— Kenneth Atchity, A Writer’s Time: Making the Time to Write
No children were harmed or neglected during the writing of this book.
— Eleanor Alspaugh
The p’int of good writing is to know when to stop.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams
Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a ‘poet.’ After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
— Steve Earle
I used to be a freelance journalist, so I had to write fast, but I always found writing nonfiction constraining. I like the freedom of fiction, where I get to invent everything, and tidy, conclusive endings are within my control.
— Michelle Gagnon
But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it.”, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
— T.C. Boyle
When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn’t exist, and we didn’t need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online.
— Al Franken
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
— Junot Díaz
In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That’s why writing female characters is so much fun. They’re not GUYS at all.
— Kimberly Black, A Fiction Writer’s Character Workbook
Eventually I’ll stop writing about you and it’ll be bittersweet. Not because I’m not in love with you, but because I’ll just love you.
— Dominic Riccitello
The only ‘ironclad rules’ in writing fiction are the laws of physics and the principles of grammar, and even those can be bent.
— Val Kovalin
If I’m going to spend a lifetime writing my story, I want it to mean something.
— Mari Serebrov
The real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.
— Bryant H. McGill
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read — something most important what I should not try to write.
— Dorothy Allison, Trash: Stories
I’ve long considered becoming a writer to be the death of nightmares. For me at least, since I started writing I hadn’t had any. Something really terrible or awful happens in a dream and you wake up and think, awesome, and reach for a pen and paper.
— Logan Kain, The Dead Will Rise First
I needed to find my way to write. I need about six hours of uninterrupted time in order to produce about two hours of writing and when I accepted that and found the way to do it then I was able to write.
— Robert B. Parker
The intellectually-inclined biographers stray from the point that the message is directed through the spoken word at the broad masses and not writing to an inbred, self-adoring intellectual e
— Russel H.S. Stolfi, Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny
I’m talking to you and it’s basically a direct communication, whereas if I’m writing a letter to you and you read the letter, there are like 12 extra deconstruction and reconstruction steps in the communication.
— Kevin J. Anderson
I didn’t get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.
— Tim O’Brien
She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political–for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)
— bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
I love writing and can’t imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn’t be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
— Iain M. Banks
I took all my TV experience and what I learned about – by writing and directing and bringing a movie to Sundance – about the realities of the independent film market: ‘Transparent’ is the marriage of those two situations.
— Jill Soloway
Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task — such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping — I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.
— Isaac Asimov
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
— Irvine Welsh
When you’re writing, you’re creating something out of nothing … A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of m
— Susanna Clarke
I won’t stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature!
— Christina Westover
Books are something which by the words breaths when you stop writing it stops it’s own proccess = breathing..
— Deyth Banger, Care
I’ve published one book before, and now I’m writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany, about fitness.
— Franka Potente
Let your writing liberate you. Write with passion to allow your feelings to breathe and enjoy the journey across blank pages.
— Amitav Chowdhury
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
— Henry Miller
My first break was becoming a staff writer on the rebooted ‘90210.’ And then I got stuck writing in the teen genre for a while.
— Allison Schroeder
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they’re called shamans, sometimes they’re called mad, and sometimes they’re called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
— Ruth Ozeki
Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: ‘There is change. Look, today’s fantastic story is tomorrow’s fact.
— A.E. van Vogt
Rather than writing about my experiences with other people, ‘Ugly Cherries’ is the first song I’ve ever written about myself. It’s a confrontation: an attempt to unpack my own queerness with humor and self care.
— Ben Hopkins
Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
— Wislawa Szymborska
I’ve always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…
— Phil Dusenberry
when you know that writing your own book of life is so difficult to begin with, the least you can do for someone else, is to try to read the pages of a person rather than skip through the chapters.
— lauren klarfeld
Sometimes I don’t even know why I’m writing what I’m writing…I’m just following these people around and taking notes.
— P. Anastasia
Each write the story of your life, so try writing the best you can.
— Kat Unda
The profoundest thing writing teaches us is how much we contradict ourselves.
— Marty Rubin
The day you left, it felt like I lost a diary in which I had been writing for so long. Now all that memories flashes in bits and pieces inside my head always and makes me wish that I could sit back and read it all over again.
— Akshay Vasu
Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country – a very different world – and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it was like living there.
— Sara Sheridan
I feel more alive when I’m writing than I do at any other time–except maybe when I’m making love.
— May Sarton
To be a writer you have to write — and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.
— Michelle Richmond
I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.
— Charles Kuralt
I like writing multiple stories at once. It’s fun to change my mindset and get transformed into a different story when I feel like it.
— B.A. Gabrielle
The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.
— Virginia Woolf
Once we start writing with a pen, we are not allowed to erase our mistakes, we are forced to deal with it.
— Akansh Malik, Love Heals Everything
The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured – we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
— Sara Sheridan
The funniest thing people say to me: “I wish I had your life”. Hello! I make a living writing about it.
— Daniel Marques
Louis Braille created the code of raised dots for reading and writing that bears his name and brings literacy, independence, and productivity to the blind.
— Bob Ney
As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.
— Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
Even writing about rainbows makes me smile.
— Anthony T. Hincks
The sacred writing gives instructions on how to live life.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
If erotic writing is the objectification of sex, then reading is its subjectification.
— Mark John Isola
With me, writing is 60% imagination, 30% people you know and 10% you don’t know where it comes from.
— Terrence McNally
I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.
— Luigi Pirandello
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
— Robert Morgan
Drawing and painting is like a quickie in bed. Were as novel writing is a long term relationship, much more fulling.
— Tara Dobbs
The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, ‘Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.’
— Lorrie Moore
Stop writing caption. Go action!
— Lenang Manggala
Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
It wasn’t until I started writing that I found a whole new appreciation for reading.
— Justin Bienvenue
If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it’s the difference between masturbation and making love—the real writer wants to touch another person.
— Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s
Writing Tip:Don’t let the “writing rules” bog you down when you’re writing the first draft; they don’t matter when you’re writing the story, only when you’re editing the story.
— Linda Westphal
But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.
— Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
Have you thrown ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ at her yet?
— Elle Lothlorien, Alice in Wonderland
I think poor poetry writing skills are excused when you’re simply trying to flush out emotions.
— Katie Kiesler, 22 and Single: A Coming of Age Story…in Progress
I wasn’t interested in writing music that wasn’t beautiful for me to listen to.
— Joanna Newsom
The skill of writing needs much patience, practicing, and time. There is no good writing from a quick effort, or a confused writer.
— Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi
My mind is like a little house, My peers break into.They rearrange my furniture, And the cabinets rifle through.They throw things out;They put things in, And erase the writing on the wall, And by the time that they walk out, It’s not my mind at all.
— Margo T. Rose, The Words
It has been said that writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
— Sholem Asch
I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.
— Ben Okri
It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
— Henri Frederic Amiel
There is nothing more valuable in the writing process than a friend to hold you accountable to your own potential.
— J.R. Young
I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I’ve been having a dreadful time with my heroine— I CAN’T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I’ve abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.
— Jean Webster, Daddy-Long-Legs
I’ve tried to explain to people that I don’t ‘love’ writing any more than I ‘love’ breathing. It’s something I do and it’s something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.
— Allison M. Dickson
I don’t mind writing philosophical thoughts. If I don’t want to die like one.
— Debasish Mridha
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
— Alexander Pope
Editing one’s writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer’s Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 3
To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken.
— Yann Martel, The High Mountains of Portugal
The woman eyed Ubie a moment before grabbing a pen and writing down the dates I had. Ubie eyed her back. Sparks flew.
— Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right
All writing is filth
— Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it’s discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I’m at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy – you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
— John Darnielle
Half hating, half loving, this free time between writing books.
— K.J. Mecklenfeld
I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.
— Vinny Guadagnino
They always tell you to do what you love. But they forget to add that writing doesn’t pay by the hour.
— Joyce Rachelle
I’ll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I’ll dictate it, if it comes to that. They’ll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers – and even then, I’ll fight ’em for it. Guaranteed.
— Wanda Lea Brayton
Writers say two things that strike me as nonsense. One is that you must follow an absolute schedule everyday. If you’re not writing well, why continue it? I just don’t think this grinding away is useful.
— Edmund White
I can’t wait to get back to writing today so I can see what happens next Kim Cormack
— Kim Cormack
The unknown characters of writing seem to be endowed with an evil of life of their own as though sentient, and fain would wrest themselves forth from the parchment and wreak mischief on whomsoever gazes upon them.
— E. Hoffmann Price
Thus far, the only people who can grant you immortality are not scientists, but writers. By writing you into their books, they may not only immortalize you, but also grant you superpowers.
— Charbel Tadros
Fall makes me think that if I fail horribly at this art thing, and then fail horribly with this writing thing, I’ll go run a pumpkin patch.
— Tyler Hojberg
Attempting to express a person’s objective reality and subjective state of mind with the written word is an endless task because writing alters our perception of reality and amends our mental equilibrium.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
To ask how I feel about writing is to ask how I feel about breathing.
— Shakirah Bourne, In Time of Need
I actually love writing for teens best. I had such an awful time in my own teen years – I love having the chance to relive them through my fiction.
— Meg Cabot
…the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.
— John Irving, The World According to Garp
Letter writing can be seen as a gift because someone has taken his/her time to write and think and express love.
— Soraya Diase Coffelt
Our parents are the coolest parents ever. No other generation went on from writing letters to their own parents to sending snapchats to their own kids.
— Sharad Vivek Sagar
I wouldn’t say I have comedy chops. I guess you get lucky with good writing because I don’t think I’m a comedian by any stretch of the imagination.
— Michael Pena
I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.
— Núria Añó
My job is to inspire others to live full lives. Whether I do that through my writing or my actions are one in the same.
— Victoria Klein
Granted, there is always much that is hidden, and we must not forget that the writing of history – however dryly it is done and however sincere the desire for objectivity – remains literature. History’s third dimension is always fiction
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
— Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life
Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.
— Francis Bacon
The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar. Moderation in moderation. Fun is scary with a happy ending. Just love. If love doesn’t transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate.
— Emily Thornton Calvo
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
— C.S. Lewis
You’re writing someone’s ‘future’ favorite book.
— M. Kirin
I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine
— Oliver Harris, The Hollow Man
I remember, in school, writing Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson and asking them to come get me out of class. I would imagine them running down the hall and asking my teacher, ‘Ms. Daniels, can we get Missy out of class? We’re here to see Missy.’
— Missy Elliott
The art of writing involves making as many cups of tea as you can in the time available for writing. Then adding extra time for writing…
— Alan Dapre
It’s no good writing if God hasn’t given you talent. People will just laugh.
— Ivan Turgenev
I’d been writing for as long as I could remember, but once I read Otherworld, I’d stopped writing original stories to focus on fan fiction. It was such a rich, exciting world that I couldn’t think of writing anything else.
— Allison van Diepen, The Vampire Stalker
The hardest thing was learning to write. I was 13, and the only writing I had done was for Social Studies. It consisted of copying passages right out of the encyclopedia.
— Tracy Kidder
What doesn’t kill me provides writing material.
— Wayne Gerard Trotman
It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.
— Elizabeth Clements, Apollo Weeps
You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. One of the things it took me longest to learn was to trust the writing process.
— Diane Setterfield
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
— Booker T. Washington
What writing means to me?-Releasing my wolves…(Natasa Alina Culea)
— Natașa Alina Culea, Natașa, bărbații și psihanalistul
I’ve always liked the idea that writing is a form of travel. And I started my writing career as a mystery novelist for adults.
— Rick Riordan
There’s writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles
— Judith Briles, Snappy Sassy Salty: Wise Words for Authors and Writers
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
— Gore Vidal
If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.
— Theodora Goss
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.
— E. L. Doctorow
Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.
— Wendy Swore
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
— Alain de Botton
When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re writing about at the time.
— Lady Gaga
I was a Social Science major in college, with an emphasis in secondary education. I took as many courses on the American colonial era and westward expansion as I could. This turned out to be wonderful preparation for writing fantasy novels.
— Rae Carson
Writing about the unholy is one way of writing about what is sacred.
— Clive Barker
The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.
— Walter Mosley
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It’s all there and you just have to find it.
— Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
Stretch your writing muscles. Maybe the sophisticated technique nagging at you is something you’re just naturally good at. How else will you know?
— Jennifer Worrell
Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, “Hi. Thanks for writing me!
— Alvi Syahrin
The grace of writing is upon me.I love writing. I write daily.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there’s going to be some kind of friction.
— Pankaj Mishra
Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
— Toni Morrison
Just by writing this story, I thought that I am the real monster, I had the feeling that I am doing it…. it was just awful!
— Deyth Banger, It’s not a happy
Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it’s time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.
— Bill Moyers
…clearly, we’re supposed to be together. If this were the internet, seventeen-year-old girls would be writing slash fiction about us as we speak.
— Vaughn R. Demont, Lightning Rod
My father would tell me if I wasn’t writing in meter verse, it wasn’t poetry.
— John Darnielle
All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.
— Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer
Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin…
— Gudjon Bergmann
Life is a rich literature. We are only writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
— Taylor Momsen
For me, all writing — storytelling and style — gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.
— Dennis R. Miller
You can only write what you know if you’ve lived, otherwise, you’ll just be writing words.
— Joseph Hunt
All the time she writing the world had continued.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
— Rebecca Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away
I think it would be cool if you were writing a ransom note on your computer, if the paper clip popped up and said, ‘Looks like you’re writing a ransom note. Need help? You should use more forceful language, you’ll get more money.’
— Demetri Martin
Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.
— Elin Hilderbrand, The Rumor
I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.
— Pico Iyer
The world is corrupt, and the way for me to make it better is not by writing letters, but joining my efforts with those of others to produce a work of beauty.
— H.S. Ede
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
Early in my songwriting career, when I was learning a lot about writing songs, I’d force myself to sit down until I came up with something.
— Luke Bryan
We were not meant to read stories anymore. We were too busy writing our own.
— Maria Elena, Eternal Youth
There’s no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they’re printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.
— Charles Bukowski
We are only writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
I am hard at work on the second draft … Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.
— Libba Bray
A deep level of personal engagement is key to good writing and complete immersion by the writer will translate into a richer and more engaging experience for the reader.
— Nidhie Sharma
While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.
— Tiffany Madison
How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions
— Miguel Syjuco
The simplest and cheapest of all reforms within institutional science is to switch from the passive to the active voice in writing about science.
— Rupert Sheldrake
There are two motives for writing a book: one, that you may save what you know, the other, that you may share what you know with the public.
— Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.
— Glen Hirshberg
When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.
— Jen Knox, After the Gazebo
Even now, Dickon was upstairs, writing sonnets to his new love, while back at Seadown House, Marianne was writing ‘Ella’ on scraps of paper and then burning them.
— Jessica Day George, Princess of Glass
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.
— Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock
He kisses like a poet. Like he’s writing poems on my lips.
— Veronica Rossi, Brooke
In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.
— Barbara W. Tuchman, Practicing History: Selected Essays
In every bit of honest writing in the world, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.
— John Steinbeck
I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that’s how the album came out so dark.
— Vanilla Ice
Reading a good book is an escape to an alternative life, writing a good book is the closest thing to actually living that life.
— Chas Scott, One Wife’s Solution: Awakening
I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.
— Steven Wright
It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
— W. H. Auden
I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I’m a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.
— Sherry Turkle
My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.
— Jeff Lindsay
Manuscript rejections might tempt you to quit writing or querying. Don’t.
— T.N. Suarez, The Limbo Tree
The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.
— Stephen Fischer
Some people I see are so talented that they are just wasting their time on writing at Facebook. Talent must be productive..
— Himmilicious
It ain’t so easy writing about nothin
— Patti Smith, M Train
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet, ” scoffed Marilla. “You’ll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put to your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
— Isadora Duncan
I can’t go on Gawker. I actually think the writing is really funny, but there is a chance that somebody is undercutting me.
— Zooey Deschanel
One of the joys of writing historical fiction is the chance to read as much as you like on a pet subject – so much that you could easily bore your friends senseless on the topic.
— Deanna Raybourn
The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
— L.L. Barkat
Before I started writing about food, my focus was really on the human relationship to plants. Not only do plants nourish us bodily – they nourish us psychologically.
— Michael Pollan
Why write wrong if the writing won’t right the wrong? (90)
— Sandra M. Gilbert, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
— Patti Smith, M Train
The world doesn’t fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.
— Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.
— Robert Benchley
I am writing a manifesto and there’s nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.
— Tristan Tzara
God is writing His story on the pages of our lives.
— Rick Anderson
[Satan] has hundreds of agents writing pornographic literature and producing sex movies to pollute [the mind]. He has intellectuals in high positions teaching a hedonistic and permissive philosophy . . .They lack an anchor for their real self.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.
— Carl Hiaasen
I’m very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.
— Johnny Cash
All right, you caught me. I’m secretly obsessed with you and spend all my free time writing about you in my journal. ‘Dear Diary, today Will was an ass for the 467th day in a row. He’s so dreamy
— Elizabeth Scott, Perfect You
Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.
— John Edgar Wideman
Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
One of my first paid gigs was writing psychology quizzes for ‘YM, ‘ a monthly teen magazine like ‘Seventeen.’
— K. A. Applegate
Imagination Is the 1st step to writing the sequel to your life. Dare to believe and you’re sure to receive.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
When you’re writing, you’re creating something out of nothing … A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.”, 6 March 2012]
— Susanna Clarke
I’m writing this because you begged. You know how I love the begging
— C.J. Roberts, Epilogue
My writing is how I maintain.
— Mark Salzman, True Notebooks: A Writer’s Year at Juvenile Hall
I knew that, when writing a book, you’re not constrained by a budget. You’re not constrained by what you can do, in terms of the special effects technology. You’re not limited to any particular running time.
— George R. R. Martin
The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.
— Anastasia Bolinder
Being a writer, I take thing seriously (not too seriously). I may be a young writer/self publisher, I do love to write and I want to share my stories to the world. but more importantly, I do take writing seriously.
— Simi Sunny
My hunger for writing will die when I have bled for the humans that never found the strength to find the words themselves
— Christopher Poindexter
I am writing something very simple that will change you and change the world.
— Debasish Mridha
Good writing just isn’t that common.
— Eric Flint
Some of my favorite movies are action movies. You want something good to say. That comes from good writing. But writing is not a skill I possess, unfortunately.
— Jason Statham
Love is a poem that keeps on writing itself, sweeping us along.
— Patricia Robin Woodruff
You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.
— Ernest Hemingway
I feel like communication is the same whether you’re cooking for someone or singing or writing a song or writing a play or ordering from McDonald’s.
— Tituss Burgess
I’m a writer, but I’m not writing to entertain you, I’m writing to keep alive my knowledge.
— Tanmaya Guru
Poetry isn’t like any writing I’ve ever heard before. I don’t understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.
— Lauren Oliver, Delirium
Some who have read the book, or at any rate reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no reason to complain, since I have similar opinions of their work, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
No one gets out of this life alive.So leave a footprint of your choice.You are writing your epitaph.You are writing it now!Life is a process, not a goal.Live it now, or you will miss it!We have time to spend and no time to waste.
— Charles Franklin, Create the Life You Need!
Like swimming riding writing or playing golf happiness can be learned.
— Dr. Boris Sokoloff
The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.
— Raymond Chandler
All human states are organic brain states – happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels – and our brains are not static.
— Siri Hustvedt
I’m sorry if…I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.
— Shannon Celebi
When writing feels like jumping a cliff, grab the nearest pen!
— Susan J. McIntire
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
— Jane Yolen
Yes, writing is that easy. Yes, writing is that hard. But if you want to do it you can. Only you can stop you.
— R.M. Donaldson
…few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They’re writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.
— Stanley Kunitz
Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don’t have the fucking part in writing a book.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she’d always believed took their fate into their own hands.
— Anna Godbersen, Envy
Choice betrays character, ” I said.“That’s not true.” Loring moved his finger along thesheet as if writing his name in cursive. “Eliza, you can’t judge a man solely on his actions. Sometimes actions are nothing more than reactions.
— Tiffanie DeBartolo
Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
— Harley King, Mother, Don’t Lock Me In That Closet!
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
— Hermann Hesse
You can only look forward to a South Dakota winter if, as with childbirth, remodeling a house, or writing a novel, you’re able to forget how bad it was the last time.
— Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
The story I’m writing finds its own voice while I’m writing it.
— Holly Lisle
The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading
— Vladimir Nabokov
If you don’t hit a newspaper reader between the eyes with your first sentence, there is no need of writing a second one.
— Arthur Brisbane
I enjoy writing alone, naked and unbothered.
— M.F. Moonzajer, LOVE, HATRED AND MADNESS
Horror, let’s face it, is basically pretty dumb. You’re writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn’t care.
— T.E.D. Klein, Seeing Red
With your life, you are writing the history of the universe.
— Debasish Mridha M.D.
A love of writing is far greater than any word count.
— Molly Looby
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting
— Dodie Smith
yes, writing is mostly a dream, but angels visit in dreams
— John Geddes
We are writing the history of our time.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Sometimes the writing just comes and we’re like, oh yeah. Gotta love when that happens.
— Buffy Andrews
The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word…
— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
— Cyril Connolly
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. … how to set yourself spinning?
— Annie Dillard
Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” –
— E.L. Doctorow
I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you’ve been all along.
— Georgann Low
I don’t know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better.
— Debasish Mridha
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful, and lowdown.
— Alice Walker, The Color Purple
I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.
— A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice journalism what will be grasped at once.
— Cyril Connolly
I do not recommend writing a screenplay in two weeks.
— Christy Hall, The Little Silkworm
The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.
— Dagobert D. Runes, A Dictionary of Thought
You’re not going to die, ” I told her, lifting my head to look at her. “I’m not done writing songs about you yet.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Linger
‘E.T.’ was the movie that made me want to make movies in the first place, and it was the first movie that made me focus on writing instead of what happens in the movie.
— Adam Green
I love pleasure of reading, writing and dancing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Ever since I could read, I’ve wanted to write a book. I never thought I had anything to write about. Maybe you don’t think this is worth writing about. But this book isn’t for you. It’s for me.
— Daniel Willey
I’m definitely of the ‘Harry Potter’-transfigured-me-into-a-reader-and-writer generation. And that’s really all I read throughout my teen years, because I really devoted all my time to writing and reading friends’ fan-fiction.
— Adam Silvera
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
— Marsha Norman
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity.
— Bill Watterson
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
— Umberto Eco
There’s a difference between the ‘art’ of writing and the ‘craft’ of writing. Art is subjective, its beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but craft is objective. There is a right way and a wrong way to craft.
— Gerard de Marigny, Rescue From Sana’a
Singing the songs, writing the lyrics, emotioning the words; that is all I can do for love.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.
— Sue Monk Kidd, Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
writing about a writer’s block is better than not writing at all
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
People read legal writing differently. When you’re at the crux of a legal argument, every step is a step in the argument. The judge will see any holes. If you do that in fiction, it’s too long and boring.
— William Lashner
In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.
— R.M. Donaldson
If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn’t know how to live. It’s your best friend.
— Jessi Colter
I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains.
— Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic
They say marriages work better if you don’t know the person too well. Maybe we should stop writing each other posthaste.
— Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut
I know, not everyone will like what I write, but writing is not about trying to please everybody.
— E.A. Bucchianeri
At some point we must stop editing everyone else’ story and start writing our own.
— John E. Carson
For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I’d started writing down, but I couldn’t. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn’t speak it, to anyone.
— Markus Zusak, Getting the Girl
What I hope my writing reflects… is a sense of the connections between all human beings… and a different perspective on the true nature of courage. For me, those are things worth exploring and writing about.
— Chris Crutcher
When I look at a lot of older stuff that I’ve written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.
— David Sedaris
Whenever I start a new book, I think, ‘This is the most interesting subject of all time. It’s sad, I’ll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.’ Every time, I’m convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.
— Gretchen Rubin
Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage. And if he has none, he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.
— Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions
Good writing is more about graft and craft than inspiration and aspiration.
— Johnny Rich
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don’t have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
— Sam Shepard
You will learn more about writing from one hour of reading than you will in six hours of writing.
— John McAleer
How hard can writing be? After all, most of the words are going to be ‘and, ‘ ‘the, ‘ and ‘I, ‘ and ‘it, ‘ and so on, and there’s a huge number to choose from, so a lot of the work has been done for you.
— Terry Pratchett, Snuff
At the outset, I think that one should be natural, not just when it comes to writing but in every area of life. If you try to be something that you are not just to impress others, then it’s a rather sad life.
— Amish Tripathi
Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That’s what writing is all about.
— Wislawa Szymborska
To have attracted readers is the most magical part of my writing life. I was not expecting you to show up when I wrote my first books. It took me by surprise. It filled me with gratitude. It still does.
— Pat Conroy, A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life
To unlock the writer’s block is to keep writing until you can unknot the “not”. If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!
— Ana Claudia Antunes, How to Make a Book
You could write your way into happiness. It might not be the happiness you’d experience if Eldric pushed Leanne from a cliff, but there’s a firefly glimmer in writing something that would please Rose.
— Franny Billingsley, Chime
Talent is helpful in writing but guts are absolutely necessary.
— Jessamyn West
1. Write every day2. Write what interests you.3. Write for the child inside of you. (Or the adult, if you are writing adult books.)4. Write with honest emotion5. Be careful of being facile6. Be wary of preaching7. Be prepared for serendipity
— Jane Yolen
The privilege is not writing a novel, it’s to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.
— Javier A. Robayo
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
— John Kenneth Galbraith
It’s okay to be crazy as long as you keep writing and are happy.
— Lori Lesko
Sometimes I have a melody in my head; sometimes it’s just a verse. I read lines from a book or movies that I watch and grab a few quotes and start writing on paper. From there, I record a really rough version and work on the song.
— Yuna
So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
A Piece of writing has to seduce the reader, it has to suspend disbelief and earn the reader’s trust
— Po Bronson
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.
— Seth Grahame-Smith
There is a difference between a poem and a writing incrusted with a feel of Poetry to fall within range
— Mpho Leteng
I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I’ve always delighted in the company of the poets I’ve read.
— Edward Hirsch
The person doing the learning is the person writing the book as much as the person reading it.
— Geoff Dyer
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.
— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.
— William Styron
Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.’That’s how it’s done, ‘ he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.
— Anita Diamant, The Boston Girl
As you become a better writer, the writing becomes more difficult. You toil harder to tell a story in a lesser number of words.
— Pawan Mishra
One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.
— Stephen King, Pet Sematary
Most of my writing life consist of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that’s how it gets done.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
It all comes down to the written word and just how comfortable I am writing them.
— C.F. Heller
I really enjoy writing about female friendship. It’s an endlessly interesting dynamic for me.
— Ruth Ware
The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Miles Between
Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
— Augusten Burroughs
When writing a novel, that’s pretty much entirely what life turns into: ‘House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.
— Neil Gaiman
Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
For me, it’s writing a book and telling people about this story.
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Being an author, writing a book was great fun. Publishing and marketing, not so fun.
— Wynne Stevens
I chose law because writing was involved. I didn’t realize how boring legal writing was, but I even learned to love that.
— Marcia Clark
My dad was Chinese-American and very conservative when it came to his family’s futures. He said if I wanted to have a secure job, I should go into science. So I did what Dad said and went to medical school, but the writing bug never left me.
— Tess Gerritsen
Cry while writing it, and readers will cry while reading it.
— A.D. Posey
…at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart.In your writing and your life.
— Dinty W. Moore, The Mindful Writer: Noble Truths of the Writing Life
The power of writing is phenomenal.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
Why would anyone pay for writing anymore when there’s Facebook and why would anyone pay for music anymore when there’s YouTube.
— Lisa Bedrick, On Christian Hot Topics
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next decade. …)
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not, then you miss the point of writing.
— Carol Morgan
I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.
— L.M. Fields
There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.
— Agatha Christie, An Autobiography
When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.
— John Adams
We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice
The funny thing about writing is that whether you’re doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That’s actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
— John Green
A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing
— Eugène Ionesco
Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.
— Dean Wesley Smith
I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn’t anyone?
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children
What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
— Ted Hughes
The beauty of ‘The Hunger Games’ and also ‘Game of Thrones, ‘ in fairness, both projects have really complex, three-dimensional, contradictory, strong women… The writing of female characters is extraordinary and equal to the men.
— Natalie Dormer
As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!
— Christy Hall, The Little Silkworm
I haven’t had writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly.
— Jennifer Egan
The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
— Samuel Johnson
Don’t imitate. Find your own writing voice and hone it until it is yours alone.
— Christopher Holliday
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn’t write again until I was a senior in college.
— Janet Fitch
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.— Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library
— Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present
The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
— Robert Cormier
There is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
— Booker T. Washington
In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.
— William S. Burroughs
Goal-getting matters. And writing down the brave acts and bold dreams you intend to accomplish will provide the spark to get them done.
— Robin S. Sharma
When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we’d talk about the connections between those things.
— Jamila Woods
I think sometimes in artwork or writing or music, you discover something that just needs to be created. It’s not even something that you want to create… You’re just pulled into it like an instrument. Like you’re part of a bigger plan.
— Danika Stone, Intaglio: The Snake and the Coins
You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
— Vikram Seth
I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way… Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God.
— Ignatius of Antioch
You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.
— Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you’ve already got.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
Every day we live, we are writing our own secret book.
— Chrys Fey
Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again.
— Debasish Mridha
[While writing history], I’ve kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I’ve come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don’t get to read other people’s mail.
— David McCullough
Yes there is a Nirvanah: it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture and in putting your child to sleep and in writing the last line of your poem.
— Kahlil Gibran
It is time to put down the pen; time to clear the throat. Speaking is a different thing altogether from writing. The spoken word has different properties, and different powers. If I have learned anything from writing down my own tale, it is this.
— Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
— Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don’t forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.
— Paula Danziger
I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
— Joyce Carol Oates
I am content when writing short stories.
— Sarah Mazucci
The three rules to writing a novel1) Write2) Write more3) Keep writing
— Scifurz
I don’t think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
— Robert Morgan
A miracle is when you take action on your written goal, and work hard to create it. Transform your dreams into the reality, by writing your goals, taking action and making them happen. This is the short recipe for top success.
— Mark F. LaMoure
Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
— John Berger
My best writing is often early in the morning and, sometimes, while working out.
— Greg Gutfeld
Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
— Derek Bok
Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.
— Avijeet Das
The internet is killing the art of writing. The big “publish” button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!-
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
— Tim Cahill
While you’re governing the colony and I’m writing political philosophy, They’ll never guess that in the darkness of night we sneak into each other’s room and play checkers and have pillow fights.
— Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
As a general rule, I surmise that most fictional stories are populated by misfits, changelings, and oddities, which is what makes the writing interesting and considered novel.
— Todd Crawshaw, Light-Years in the Dark: Storypoems
Develop the skill of writing to avoid errors but if you do make them, don’t be demotivated
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
— Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.
— Michelle M. Pillow
Storytelling is a gift, but writing is a learned art.
— Beem Weeks
Dedicating a writing session to someone is like sending a prayer for them out into the world. I will never know if my writing, my dedication to them, my prayer for them made any difference in their lives. But I know it makes a difference in mine.
— Elizabeth Rusch
For years in football I was angry with the game, angry with pundits and, a lot of the time, angry with the journalists writing about me. All that changed when I got my break in movies.
— Vinnie Jones
To find the courage to keep writing after constant failure is awesomeness. Winning is eminent.
— Sereda Aleta Dailey, How to Write High Quality Articles In Half the Time
I do not start with a full knowledge of the facts; the whole attraction of writing history is to educate myself: it is an exploration into the unknown – ‘a journey without maps, ‘ to borrow Graham Greene’s phrase.
— Michael Korda
I tried writing this book about a singer in a wedding band, but realized I only wanted to write the book so I could have an excuse to sing with a wedding band as research. That’s not a good enough reason to write a book.
— Megan McCafferty
I don’t remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
— Mark Haddon
It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don’t often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I’ve always known existed around me and within me.
— Casey Curry
If you haven’t cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your’re writing fiction.
— Shannon L. Alder
Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile.
— Christopher Gerard, Talon: A Jack Rawson Saga
I’d realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
— Isabel Allende, Maya’s Notebook
She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.
— Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
— Jorge Luis Borges
I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: … Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
— Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
That isn’t writing at all, it’s typing.
— Truman Capote
If you are writing fiction, think like a god. Release all the power of your imagination; create worlds and destroy them at your will, create as many miracles as your story needs
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
When I’m writing I don’t want anyone else in the room – including myself.
— Jonathan Franzen
‘Rookie’ is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in.
— Tavi Gevinson
[G]ive nothing centrality, because writing is about continually shifting weight from one thing and moment to the other.
— Amit Chaudhuri
(N)ot writing was hard work, almost as hard as writing.
— Jincy Willett, The Writing Class
Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Reading and writing is an escape for me. Where I can imagine and become who I want to be when I want to be. Where I want to be, it’s just a matter of having the imagination to do so!
— Zachary Frerichs
The fact of the matter is that you should really stop concerning yourself with writing a book because anyone can write a book that totally sucks. There is nothing special about that.
— Ashly Lorenzana
Having writers block sucks more than my actual writing. And my writing would be astonishing if I could write how I feel.
— Ally Spina
I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.
— Frank Ocean
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
— Jhumpa Lahiri
The secret is writing down one simple line after another.
— Charles Bukowski
I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.
— Winston Churchill
Whenever I encounter writer’s block, I stop writing … with my hands; and I then start writing with my legs.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I had imagined myself into existence. I wrote because of an inner need, and that need was to create a clearer vision of myself, and in writing I became what I wrote.
— Christopher Priest, The Affirmation
There is only one rule for writing and that is go ahead and start writing.
— Debasish Mridha
There is a point at which honesty becomes mischief. That’s when your writing becomes irresistible.
— Daphne Athas
You know, writing is really difficult, and it takes a real patience and a skill. I don’t know if I have that. I admire it in others, so much, and I envy it.
— Adam Scott
What really matters is your movies and how good a person you are. Otherwise, tabloids and news channels writing about you only builds your curiosity and stardom and propels you to reach wider places.
— Ranbir Kapoor
Frustration of mind can be revel through writing something even if it will be never read.
— Kartik Mehta
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.
— Margaret Atwood
I don’t think you get to good writing unless you expose yourself and your feelings. Deep songs don’t come from the surface; they come from the deep down. The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart.
— Judy Collins
Just as writing can become calligraphy when it’s creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement—the art of living.
— H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation
Not all of Derrida’s writing is to everyone’s taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: ‘What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this “I” who speaks of speaking?
— Terry Eagleton
Don’t worry about what you’re writing or whether it’s good or even whether it makes sense.
— Lauren Oliver
When I’m writing fiction, I read nonfiction or biographies. Now I’m watching very old movies or old foreign films. I don’t immerse myself in whatever’s going on in whatever area I’m working in.
— Whit Stillman
Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
What does it mean to not be alone? I’ve approached that question through music, technology, writing and other means.
— Jaron Lanier
I want to take a trip to Shakespeare’s brain and vacation there with his thoughts may be I also start writing about twisted love and betrayals.
— Megha Khare, Write like no one is reading 2
Magic and mystery writing follow the same, time-tested, three-act structure to stage their drama; set the scene, build the suspense, reveal the answer. In magic, these phases are known as the pledge, the turn and the prestige.
— Steve Burrows, A Shimmer of Hummingbirds: A Birder Murder Mystery
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business.
— John Steinbeck
Writer’s block? I’ve heard of this. This is when a writer cannot write, yes? Then that person isn’t a writer anymore. I’m sorry, but the job is getting up in the fucking morning and writing for a living.
— Warren Ellis
I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.
— R. L. Stine
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
— Virginia Woolf
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.
— Truman Capote
Ms Rainn, you might say, is a writing prodigy and I’m her mentor.
— S.A. Tawks, The Spirit of Imagination
It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
I have terrible handwriting. I now say it’s a learning disability… but a nun who was a very troubled woman hit me over the fingers with a ruler because my writing was so bad.
— Andrew Greeley
When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical – one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.
— Margaret Atwood
The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
— Mylo Carbia, The Raping of Ava DeSantis
Sometimes writing is like playing with fire… like trying to tame an uncontrollable beast.
— A.D. Posey
What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer’s Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 3
Any writing teacher tells you to write what you know, and for better or for worse, Washington is a world I know well.
— Kristin Gore
Good writing demands self-discipline and constant learning
— Cecil Murphey, Writer to Writer: Lessons from a Lifetime of Learning
It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.
— Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins.”From “Word Quake
— Eileen Granfors, And More White Sheets: An expanded text edition
I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I’ve experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.
— Pixie Lott
I’m not writing non-fiction. I don’t feel anything about me as a kid was unique. Except that I had more interest in being alone and using my imagination.
— John Irving
I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once when I was on the bestseller list I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
— Jacqueline Briskin
Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them.
— Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings
Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It’s meAnd who is the poet writing this poem?That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles
— Pierre Albert-Birot, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your
— Peter Gould, Write Naked
For me, writing is just as much a choice as breathing. I can quit anytime I want, but not starting again would prove fatal.
— Pamela Morris
I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.
— Pam Houston
I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision
— a complex of emotions
I never feel really comfortable unless I am either actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .
— Dennis R. Miller, One Woman’s Vengeance
In order to start our mythic journey to end our suffering, we need to enter into a real and dynamic dialogue with our hearts. Start by writing a letter to your heart, telling it all that’s going on with you now and asking it for guidance.
— Carolyn Elliott, Awaken Your Genius: A Seven-Step Path to Freeing Your Creativity and Manifesting Your Dreams
She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.
— Kelli Russell Agodon, Hourglass Museum
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
— Wole Soyinka
The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas.
— Oliver Markus
It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.
— Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
Finished crap can be edited. Unfinished greatness languishes forever. The only bad writing is the thing you didn’t write!
— Margarita Gakis
My purpose of writing is to express my love for you, no matter, who you are, where you live or whatever you do.
— Debasish Mridha
If they had said my writing wasn’t good enough, fair enough, that’s an opinion. But to say it’s too complex is to insult the intelligence of the so-called young.
— Tanith Lee
I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one’s imagination and one’s goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.
— Miriam Toews
I know who the real hero is, and it isn’t me or brave Lanaya. It’s an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won’t let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.
— Rodman Philbrick, The Last Book in the Universe
Does writing exist for the typewriter, or the typewriter for writing? . . . the invention of the computer would one day make [the] argument obsolete . . . technologies exist for humans, and not vice versa.
— Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English
[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they’re writing it!
— Terry Pratchett
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
— Anne Lamott
When you are angry try your best to go to sleep, it keeps you away from speaking, writing and thinking while you are angry.
— Amit Kalantri
I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn’t that way growing up.
— Tony Dungy
Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.
— Fennel Hudson, A Writer’s Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 3
Send message to the future by writing it today!
— Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza
My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability, as a child, to lie with a straight face.
— Ashwin Sanghi
… And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive–to be multi-dimensional–you must barter away some control.
— Elizabeth Sims
It was actually a women’s writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
— Mary Gordon
You know you’re writing a good thriller when you make yourself paranoid.
— Shirley B. Garrett, Deadly Compulsion
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make.
— Truman Capote, Truman Capote: Conversations
As a boy, reading was my religion. It helped me to discover my soul. Later, writing helped me to record its journey.
— Ruskin Bond, The Lamp is Lit: Leaves from a Journal
The church wasn’t an organization in the first century. They weren’t writing checks or buying property. The church has matured and developed over the years. But for some reason, the last thing to change is the structure of leadership.
— Andy Stanley
You think writing a book is hard? Wait until you give it to someone to read.
— Ken Stark, Stage 3: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller
My favourite example (of ex-patriotism) is James Joyce who left Ireland at nineteen and never came back. But he spent the rest of his life writing about Ireland from the perspective of living in Paris.
— Karl Beveridge
When I began writing science fiction in the middle ’60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
— Vernor Vinge
This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.
— Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
When it comes to overcoming writing hurdles, getting sick is like suffering a review from a critic with an axe to grind; you can’t let it get you down!
— Max Hawthorne
When I was in my early to mid-teens, that was a very heavy diet of science fiction and fantasy, so those were the kinds of books I tended to imagine writing someday, or even began to try to write.
— Michael Chabon
You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.
— Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir
When we are writing or painting or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions and opened to a wider world, where colours are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
— Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone’s.
— Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide To The Pleasures Of Writing Poetry
I think the beauty of the writing of ‘Game of Thrones’ is not that the characters are fearless; it’s how they overcome their fear, you know?
— Natalie Dormer
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
— Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.
— Aporva Kala, Life… Love… Kumbh…
We want to fight.”“And I want J.K. Rowling to keep writing in the Potterverse, but I know that’s never going to happen, ” I said blithely.
— Laura Kreitzer, Fallen Legion
I stopped writing in the obvious. I wrote how I saw it and if they don’t understand it, that’s fine.
— Dominic Riccitello
Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day – like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)
— Brandon Sanderson
I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.
— Kapil Sibal
Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
— John Updike
Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
— Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings
Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about
— Anonymous
However, please allow me to say that the fundamental style of my writing has been to start from my personal matters and then to link it up with society, the state and the world.
— Kenzaburo Oe
I went through a stage of writing my cramped hand in tiny books. My two sisters and I did have our Bronte period. My mum is from Yorkshire, and we would go up to the Moors. It tapped into our romantic visions of ourselves.
— Rachel Joyce
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
— Gustave Flaubert
Forgiveness and faith are like writing a story, they take time, effort, revisions.
— Daisy Hernandez, A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir
The secret to writing a book is starting on page one and not stopping until you write the words “The End”.
— Bryan Koepke
The worst part of writing is meeting all these great new characters and having no one to talk about (the adventures you share with) them.
— Claudia Bakker
Writing music and lyrics, you tend to become a control freak – sitting alone in your room with a bare light bulb over your head, writing communist manifestos.
— Jason Robert Brown
The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.
— Richard Harding Davis
I’m merely dying to be remembered for simply writing about my living memories
— Michael Biondi
My name is Mr Bread.” He began writing his name neatly on the board. “But you can call me Peter.”Suddenly there was quiet, as thirty little brains whirred.”Pita Bread!” proclaimed a ginger-haired boy from the back.
— David Walliams, Billionaire Boy
I believe ghost story writing is a dying art.
— H. Russell Wakefield
It’s a bit cliche, but you can’t go wrong by writing what you know. Even if you’re a horrible writer, your own knowledge and experience is unrivaled. Nobody knows what you know like you know what you know. The way you see things is pretty unique.
— Issa Rae
Sure, it’s simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.
— Nancy Zafris
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
— Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
It is a dangerous thing to substitute reading or writing for living. Live first, then write.
— Kamand Kojouri
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.
— Margaret Atwood
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you’re not aware there was a writer there.
— Stephen Sondheim
Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
— W. Somerset Maugham
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
— Ernest Hemingway
-I haven’t been writing for years. I lost faith. it’s not for me. Too many levels.-What levels?-All those levels of existence. us down here, and up there, high above us. the ceiling of the universe. I’ve chosen nothingness.
— Tadeusz Konwicki
Don’t start right off writing the ‘Great American Novel’, that’s too much pressure and you’ll get disappointed; start with porn, it’s fun and a good way to get your feet wet.
— scavola
For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.
— Sylvia Plath
I enjoy writing historical fiction because it allows me to live more lives than just this one.
— Karen A. Chase
I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.
— Jason Bateman
We spent 10 years writing our first fiction story and truly hope people like it.
— Tony D’Urso, The Good, Bad and Gold: The Pursuit
Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman’s terms).
— J.M. Varner
Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
— Amy Poehler, Yes Please
I always go in very emotionally when I’m doing music. Sad or happy, I’m always into it. I have a hard time writing for other people, writing with someone else in mind.
— Erik Hassle
It’s one of those times when the question is its own answer…. The writing is itself the solution to the inability to write!
— Yael Shahar, Returning: Reflections & Resources on Teshuvah
Your mind is beautiful. No matter what problems people say you have, every mind is capable of writing something inspiring and beautiful.
— B.A. Gabrielle
I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.
— Sandra Cisneros
When writing for the page, the focus is on the design – how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.
— Rupi Kaur
What was reckless, I decided, was the way people were writing off huge swaths of the world as unsafe, unstable, unfriendly, when all they needed to do was go and see for themselves
— Amanda Lindhout, A House in the Sky
When you’re writing a whodunit, the dead body is the most important character. It’s the pivot point around which the plot spins.
— Adrianne Lee, You Don’t Know Jack
In writing there is art – and in art there is craft …
— Susi Moore
The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story
— Brandt Legg
There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
— H.L. Mencken
There are times when I’m writing where time feels irrelevant. Those are the moments I know I’m creating magic.
— Anastasia Bolinder
When I consider writing I sometimes wonder why doesn’t everybody do it, other times I wonder why does anybody do it.
— Tonny K. Brown
One’s writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it’s all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
— Leo Tolstoy
Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
— Pierre Abélard, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
Lesson learned: If you’re already resorting to writing shitty poetry (not the lovey-dovey kind) to get your guys attention within one month of meeting him, he is not the one.
— Kate Madison, Spilled Perfume: A Memoir
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
— Mark Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
They told me that they are starting a classic label, and wanted me to be the first artist. So I signed, and am producing myself, and writing my own music, but I’m their first artist on their classic label. And I have creative control.
— Teena Marie
Day after day, week after week; writing great fiction takes time, emotion, skill and effort.
— Carla H. Krueger
What writing practice, like Zen practice does is bring you back to the natural state of mind…The mind is raw, full of energy, alive and hungry. It does not think in the way we were brought up to think-well-mannered, congenial.
— Natalie Goldberg
I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there’s any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
— C.S. Lewis
The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.
— Iain M. Banks
…the secret to writing is to get your own pain – shout it out till it hurts your throat – weep it into your pillow – then write it down …
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you’re going with a story, but they have other ideas.
— Quinn Anderson
I hope that I capture something in my work that is about the elusive, the magical and powerful and the transformative. The writing in itself is transformative for me.
— H. Raven Rose, Liquid Me: Poetry and Prose
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed in keeping rabbits.
— Edith Sitwell
The fact that Iam writing to youin Englishalready falsifies what Iwanted to tell you.My subject:how to explain to youthat I don’t belong to Englishthough I belong nowhere else, if not herein English.
— Gustavo Perez Firmat
My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.
— Carla H. Krueger
So here I am with this double life, one where my grammatically incorrect writing is a nice success with tens of thousands of readers, and another one where my carefully written books are read by a dozen people.
— Christian A. Dumais
The places and people in the following stories have been represented accurately to the best of my ability; yet my writing is supposed to be a tale, and as in any historical novel, my own imagination has blended with fact to create poetical reality.
— Eric Sloane
If your writing doesn’t keep you up at night, it won’t keep anyone else up either
— James M. Cain
HARV, can you help at all here?” I asked, spinning downward.“I am writing your obituary. Well, not so much writing it as updating it, ” HARV told me.If I lived, I was going to kill HARV.
— John Zakour, The Flaxen Femme Fatale
One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck’s journals while he was writing ‘East of Eden, ‘ which was so cool.
— Paul Dano
I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
— Edward Hirsch
Make your writing memorable.
— A.D. Posey
If you really have talent, you know, you’ll go on writing – whatever people say to you.
— Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
If you don’t make time for writing, writing won’t make time for you.
— Sandra Elaine Scott
I dream that one day I would be a published writer and people would read my books – if not, I would be living in the mountains in a small hut, near a pond where swans swim, writing a diary for myself.
— Srinidhi.R
The best kind of day is a writing day
— Buffy Andrews
Time is not something to be killed. Doing so suffocates a part of us, writing off part of our life that could, or rather should, be spent doing something meaningful.
— Fennel Hudson, A Waterside Year – Fennel’s Journal – No. 2
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?
— Joan Didion
I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.
— E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers
Writing from the perspective of women survivors of violence, Moore is at his most appealing; though his writing about sex and brutality can verge on the exploitative, he sometimes reveals an unexpected sympathy with dominated women.
— Zoë Brigley, Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels
I’ve consciously tried not to romanticize anything, especially not intelligence work. I’ve always said that I’ve been writing a series of episodic, naturalistic novels. The people just happen to be spies, politicians, civil servants.
— Charles McCarry
Sometimes I feel like I’m writing pornography in the notebook of the gods.
— Grant Morrison, The Invisibles, Vol. 6: Kissing Mister Quimper
But to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.
— Ernie Pyle
The truth is I’m not really interested in travel writing as it’s generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.
— Robyn Davidson
There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.
— Kirk Wilson
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. Fr letter to Maxwell Perkins 1945
— Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.
— Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night
The morning is always my best time of the day for writing because that’s when my head is best.
— Zoe Foster Blake
Even when I’m in quite a happy state of mind, I like writing really sad songs. I think a lot of people do.
— Ellie Goulding
I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing ‘Bridget Jones’ to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.
— Helen Fielding
Always being myself and my salve, which is life. I’m not lonely, if that’s what it seems like. Always writing things down.
— Chris Campanioni
I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching – but that won’t pay the Bergdorf’s bill. I think I’ll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
— Erica Jong
The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It’s quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.
— Nadine Gordimer, Conversations With Nadine Gordimer
‘Castle’ is a guy living in a fantasy world. He’s in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.
— Nathan Fillion
Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.
— Don Roff
I used to spend a lot of time dreaming and writing poetry.
— Mohit Chauhan
And now we who are writing women and strange monstersStill search our hearts to find the difficult answers, Still hope that we may learn to lay our handsMore gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
— May Sarton, Selected Poems
Getting started on writing a book isn’t as hard as it sounds. You don’t need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.
— Natasha Lester
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.
— T.S. Eliot
I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.
— Chang-Rae Lee
But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.
— Tom Waits
I cried for her , But not now because my tears become so dried and my heart becomes so solid….. But still loves her with this solid heart But don’t know why still eyes are wet while i am writing this quote. 🙁
— Amardeep Singh
The joy of writing is the fullness of existence.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.
— Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
I find that writing is as magical as the genre I write in. When the story comes alive and takes over, it’s truly a journey to another world.
— K.M. Randall
That’s writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn’t turn up.
— Rachel Cusk, Outline
The best writing speaks when the heart whispers.
— A.D. Posey
There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.
— W. Somerset Maugham
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
— Paul Auster
I love a good laugh as well, I think that’s so important in life, which is probably why I’ve dabbled in comedy writing as well as horror. I think if you can make someone laugh or smile it’s the most special thing in the world.
— Paul Kane
If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
— Benjamin Franklin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, and if you’re planning on writing that’s probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven’t fucked you up, well, you’ve got nothing to go on, so then they’ve fucked you up good and proper.
— Alan Bennett
Yes, writing comes easy for me and it’s also a painful, arduous process. I love writing. I hate writing. I never want to write again, and I want to write all day, everyday.
— Tyrone Jaeger
Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.
— Kelli Jae Baeli, Don’t Fall in Love With Your Words: Fall in Love With Your Craft
Let your emotions guide your hand to the paper and watch how your sorrows can turn into beauty. For tears relieve your body but writing relieves your heart.
— Raneem Kayyali
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it’s not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
— Joyce Carol Oates
However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a factory: just a meaningless production of words.
— Alice Driver
I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I’m enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.
— Vikram Seth
My ideas are a shapeless mass that my writing molds into beauty.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
I want my writing to bring people not just to think of “trees” as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.
— Roger Deakin
Narrative writing represents a personal attempt to quantify and understand the psychological singularities behind the author’s personality traits as delineated by winnowed list of formative life experiences.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
A writing cook and a cooking writer must be bold at the desk as well as the stove.
— M.F.K. Fisher
I’m a playwright who gets involved in movies when I’m not writing a play.
— Tom Stoppard
One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It’s the door into that magical reading/writing state – the raw material for making the story real.
— Sara Sheridan
One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.
— William Zinsser
If writing novels – and reading them – have any redeeming social value, it’s probably that they force you to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else. Which increasingly is something we all need to know.
— Margaret Atwood
One of the things everybody seems to want to ask writers is, “Where do you get your ideas?” When people ask me this, my usual response is, “Ideas are the easy part. The hard part is writing them down.
— Patricia C. Wrede
You’re writing every moment in your mind but not putting it down on paper. Write your thoughts
— it will be beautiful.
I’ve discovered that sometimes writing badly can eventually lead to something better. Not writing at all leads to nothing.
— Anna Quindlen
To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you’ve already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.
— John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades
Most likely, they were writing the same type of macho bullshit that I wrote, trying to sound tough with their words in case words were all that made it home.
— Clint Van Winkle, Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.
— Sara Sheridan
I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.
— Shelby Foote
Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.
— Vanessa Wu, Love Has No Limits
We all know writing is a reclusive, lonely endeavour. It just is. But nobody writes alone.
— Iain Reid, One Bird’s Choice
When writing a book, don’t think about who is going to see it. Write about how you feel in the moment. Don’t let a good idea get away.
— B.A. Gabrielle
We should all live as though someone is writing a book about us.
— J.R. Rim
When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.
— Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl
Twitter is a serious writing distraction. As are grapefruits. The two have nothing else in common.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you’ve set. But if you’re writing about science, you have to first learn what you’re writing about.
— Octavia E. Butler
It’s the writing that teaches you.
— Isaac Asimov
When I started writing ‘Diary of a Wimpy Kid, ‘ I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.
— Jeff Kinney
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
— Eric Maisel, A Writer’s San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul
Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now…
— Belle Whittington
You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
— Ernest Hemingway
will you be the one reading the book or writing the book
— Abe
Personal writing takes up where public education leaves off – with intent to know what is important about life.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Ninety percent of writing is about listening.
— Natalie Goldberg
If writing didn’t require thinking then we’d all be doing it.
— Jeremiah Laabs
The ultimate goal of writing is forgiveness.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Commercial fiction writing – where my bread is buttered – is fairly straightforward. The writing is simply efficiency and story. The more you have of one the less you need of the other.
— Joe Ducie
The art of writing is the manipulation of words to ease the mind and free the imagination
— Danielle M. Maistry
When I was a teen, I thought I would have to choose between my writing or my music or my art, but it turns out it’s a difficult juggling game but I can do all of them.
— Maggie Stiefvater
Royal Young’s writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.
— Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After
You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.
— Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
There is a gap in my work from ’84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn’t writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
— Philip Schultz
Never put off writing until you are better at it.
— Gary Henderson
I knew I could always earn money from a job. What I didn’t know was could I extend the dream of writing beyond my trip?
— Gina Greenlee, Belly Up: Surviving and Thriving Beyond a Cruise Gone Bad
We can no longer allow them to write just stories and poems; we must teach them the forms of nonfiction writing as well, specifically that of writing on demand.
— Troy Hicks
I haven’t any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours – and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.
— Joyce Carol Oates
Writing things was important, wasn’t it? Nakata asked.’Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
— Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.
— William Carlos Williams
Start writing by thinking, not wrestling with words.
— Jonathan Price, Put That in Writing
A constant discomfort derives from this–writing these sentences, or any other for that matter–I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.
— Semezdin Mehmedinović
I’d love to work with Aaron Sorkin on something. Just the way he writes, he has no fear in writing people that are fiercely intelligent, and I love that.
— David Tennant
I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off every morning after breakfast hoping to discover something new and repeatable, something worth writing about.
— Paul Theroux
I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn’t have a point.
— Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays
When my dad passed, there’s a lot of sadness right below the surface, and I think there will be until the day I die. So, writing sad songs helps it. And when I sing them, it’s pure therapy for me.
— Ashley Monroe
If writing is your passion, write and don’t let anyone else convince you otherwise. You don’t need to quit your day job to do it. Create a realistic schedule and stick with it.
— Bindu Adai
When Tito was born, I was writing my fifth novel. That was how I saw my future: living in Venice and jumping from novel to novel. Tito’s birth changed all that.
— Diogo Mainardi, The Fall: A Father’s Memoir in 424 Steps
A miracle is when you take action on your written goal, and work hard to create it. Transform your dreams into reality, by writing your goals, taking action and making them happen. This is the short recipe for top success.
— Mark F. LaMoure
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
— Neil Gaiman
The time is ripe for young Indian authors writing in the English language.
— Anurag Shourie, An Ode Towards Hope –
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
— Chuck Palahniuk
I’m considering writing a self-help book and giving people 20 cents to read it. This way, I can be sure they all get new paradigms.
— Ryan Lilly
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
— A. J. Liebling
Every stage of life is a chapter of a book. You must begin writing your life book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.
— Rosita Forbes
There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.
— Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing “yes” in the sky.
— Monique Duval
I do not use psychiatric terms in my writing because the entrenched and developing behaviours were perfectly normal reactions to abnormal situations.
— Jane Hersey, Breath in the Dark
If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.
— Elaine Liner
My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend “who is still liable to surprise us.
— N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.
— Sara Sheridan
The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
— Mark Twain
All stories interest me, and some haunt me until I end up writing them. Certain themes keep coming up: justice, loyalty, violence, death, political and social issues, freedom.
— Isabel Allende
Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you.
— Marsha Norman, The Fortune Teller
I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.
— Christopher Darden
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
— Marvin Hamlisch
The beauty of writing is imagining new endings to a time of darkness, like burning off a morning fog with the heat and clarity of the sun.
— J.J. Brown
In the Steven F. Austin Colony, which was the first colony, Texans first established a provisional government in 1835 with the intention of writing a declaration of independence soon after.
— Michael McCaul
The same Andrew Smith is in all these books, but for me, I feel like you can see the point in his writing where he decided he no longer had anything to lose. That, to me, is when he reached the top of his game.”~ Christa Desir
— Christa Desir
I rent a Jacobean-fronted hunting lodge in Hampshire from the National Trust and like to go there as much as possible. I’ve grown to love it so much, especially when writing my memoirs there at weekends.
— Nicholas Haslam
How could I fall asleep, when I love the pleasure of reading and writing at night?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
You must begin writing your life book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I love writing poetry because it’s pretty. I love writing pretty.
— Richelle E. Goodrich
There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.
— Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?
If any accolades come in the writing of this story, all praise will be His, all Glory will rightly go to Him. If He will allow me to share some part in this, I am truly humbled.
— Lynn Dove, Shoot the Wounded
The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature — a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.
— Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
I write about heartbreak because I like writing about sad things, but I’m writing happy songs, too!
— Jackie Evancho
It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job–where the machine seems to run on much as usual–I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much.
— C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
Maybe all you need to do is find the heartbeat in everything. And if writing is living, the discovery of the beat of a heart, then when you read me, you are living by my side.
— Meia Geddes, Love Letters to the World
Sometimes writing is just rubbing words together long enough to make a fire.
— Gillian Marchenko, Sun Shine Down: A Memoir
If we are interested in a writing life – as opposed to a writing career – then we are in it for the process and not the product – for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.
— Julia Cameron
I certainly didn’t say while writing ‘Gossip Girl, ‘ ‘Oh this is going to be big!’ It was really like, ‘Oh god, everyone’s gong to hate these people! They’re so bratty!’ But I actually think what is so appealing about them is the humor in them.
— Cecily von Ziegesar
I feel rather a fool writing down my thoughts
— Ellen Emerson White, Voyage on the Great Titanic: The Diary of Margaret Ann Brady, R.M.S. Titanic, 1912
I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book – that one book every writer carries within him – the image of his own soul.
— Ignazio Silone
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you’re trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you’re writing into relief so that you can actually see it.
— Elizabeth McCracken
I read not for entertainment but to feel what the writer has felt while writing even though if it was fiction.
— Pushpa Rana, Just the Way I Feel
The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.
— John Mason Brown
Truths are dangerous, ” he said.”Then why are you writing them in a book?””To catch them between the pages, ” said Teddy, “and trap them before they disappear.
— Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue
Write what you feel like writing at first without worrying about how it sounds. That’s what second drafts are for. Enjoy the first one!
— B.A. Gabrielle
The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
— Eldridge Cleaver
I’ve always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.
— Sara Sheridan
It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.
— Ray Bradbury
I had to be the world’s biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
— Benjamin Alire Sáenz
For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I’m surprised where the journey takes me.
— Jack Dann
You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble – and I’m speaking of life, not writing – is ‘no humor too black.’
— Elizabeth McCracken
It is difficult for me to commit to an manuscript. Once, I get finished writing it. I get this feeling of adrenaline, and satisfaction. This is when the amusement begins, for the writer’s side of me.
— Mary Sage Nguyen
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
— Robert Morgan
Maybe you’re one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don’t read, your writing is going to suck.
— Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
Talent is required, but much of writing is a matter of craft, which develops with time, attention, patience and practice, like playing an instrument or learning to dance.
— Susan Wiggs
How to write a book? Start writing, continue writing and finish writing.
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
I’m not good at anything except writing jokes. I wasn’t good at sports, I wasn’t good at anything artsy, ever. I think there was a real worry for a while about what I would be good at. I was just this chubby little Indian kid who looked like a nerd.
— Mindy Kaling
I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.
— Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants
I started writing to make sense of the world that exists inside my heart
— Judy Croome
‘The Turner Diaries’ is a racist daydream by a former physics teacher writing under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.
— Gore Vidal
I intend to keep writing Christmas songs. There’s still a lot more about Christmas that can be captured and feel like old-time Christmas. A lot of the traditions haven’t been explained in song.
— Clint Black
One of the biggest differences between you and a traditionally published author is that a self-pubbed author is responsible for everything. Not just writing the book – but cover design, editing, producing, distribution, and publicity as well.
— M. J. Rose
You don’t have to be successful on a grand scale like winning a talent competition or writing a New York Times bestseller – if you have enough small things that you can be successful at then eventually they outshine all your failures.
— Lindsey Rietzsch, Successful Failures: Recognizing the Divine Role That Opposition Plays in Life’s Quest for Success
I’m writing a book. I’m almost finished. I numbered the pages. Now all I have to do is fill them in.
— Steven Wright, Steven Wright Humor
We grew up in abject poverty. Acting, writing scripts and skits were a way of escaping our environment at a very young age.
— Viola Davis
The point of good writing is knowing when to stop.
— L. M. Montgomery
I’m a drinker with writing problems.
— Brendan Behan
Bottom line, when someone defensively says their way of writing is their style, then that usually means they’re making an excuse for poor prose.
— A.J. Flowers, A Guide to Writing Your First Novel
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more
— Gustave Flaubert, November
The cool thing about writing music, writing anything, is that once you publish it, it’s there forever.
— Ryan Tedder
Describing colors to a blind is what writing is all about.
— Viraj J. Mahajan, A Young Admirer
…my writing is a wild mustang – more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Instead of writing backwards over what had happened, giving structure and meaning to his story, he wrote forwards, slipping into troubling futures.
— Alan McCluskey, The Reaches
When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
— Samuel Colbran, Lake Merrin
Being in a rock band is about touring. It’s about writing songs and it’s about making records but it’s also about taking a wonderful smile onto that stage and making the people feel good about themselves.
— James Young
I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.
— Troye Sivan
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
— Ethel Wilson
Like everyone else in this world, I have had struggles. There’s disappointment and obstacles in everybody’s life. I feel like I was writing ‘Second Chance’ not just for myself, but also for the people who have struggled.
— El DeBarge
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don’t know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Any doctor will admit that any drug can have side effects, and that writing a prescription involves weighing the potential benefits against the risks.
— Mark Udall
It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.
— Woodrow Wilson
I’ve been writing a lot, I’ve a few projects I’m trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing… Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I’d be thrilled.
— Paul Michael Glaser
Words disappear in the air, but writing remains. If you want something to be remembered about you, write it down
— Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity
You don’t write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.
— Nelson Algren, Nonconformity
Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.
— Stephen King
Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
— Christina Baldwin
I will always treasure the privilege of writing the ‘Sports of The Times’ column.
— George Vecsey
Question: You’re 21-years-old, a young adult writing mature adult literary fiction. Imaj: Yes, I feel creativity is an ageless thing.
— Imaj, Harlow
I understand that in our work – doesn’t matter whether it’s acting or writing – what’s important isn’t fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it’s the ability to endure.
— Anton Chekhov, The Seagull
Writing is a lonely pursuit. The only thing working is imagination and hands.The only difference between writing and masturbation is one is presumably intended for a mass audience.
— Mark Bell
Journal writing is a wonderful pathway to self-awareness.
— Rand Olson, Children of Promise: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Healthy Kids
If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it’s his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it – that’s different; it makes it worthwhile then.
— Alan Marshall
The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.
— Richard P. Denney
An author’s strong belief and enthusiasm will affect the writing of the book and often the publisher’s commitment to it.
— Sterling Lord, Lord of Publishing: A Memoir
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.
— Beatrix Potter
You will always find me writing and reading as long as I have the breath of life within me.
— K.D. Green
A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.
— James A. Owen
Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.
— Nick Cohen, You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
I tend to like writing long stories in comics. I worked on ‘Flash, ‘ ‘Teen Titans’ and ‘JSA’ for years. I always like diving into characters.
— Geoff Johns
It seems to me that since I’ve had children, I’ve grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
— Anne Tyler
In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extra-genetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example.
— Carl Sagan, Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
I have four shelves covered with journals that I’ve written. Dad and I are writing songs together. I’ve probably written 100 songs.
— Miley Cyrus
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando
I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there’s a good chance you were not called.
— Robin Caldwell
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
— Ben Okri
One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
— Andre Dubus III
A true piece of writing sets you free.
— A.D. Posey
I’ve done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I’ve been swindled all the same because it’s never anything more.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
— Wislawa Szymborska
I like pens. My writing is so amazing there’s never a need to erase.
— Todd Barry
Don’t ever trust anyone who’s writing a book. They make up lies for a living.
— Rosemary Clement-Moore, Texas Gothic
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it – or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it.
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.
— Toni Morrison
And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.
— Rick Riordan
I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.
— Kanye West
I started writing poetry and philosophy when I was 17 years old and my mind so was wild. Now I’m 56 and I often want to write like a child.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
Novel writing is like heroin addiction it takes everything you’ve got.
— James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling
If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book
— Maz Jobrani, I’m Not a Terrorist, But I’ve Played One On TV: Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Funny Man
I begin with writing the first sentence—and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
— Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
True writing is not an art or science but it’s an anthem to preach own soul
— Kunal Jajal
All I ever really wanted to do was arouse souls through my writing and enjoy my journey to becoming one with myself and with the world.
— Terry A. O’Neal
To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I’m writing a script, one of the first things I do is find the music I’m going to play for the opening sequence.
— Quentin Tarantino
You will do well not to write for money, not because you won’t get rich doing it, but because writing fueled by that sort of motivation becomes dull and lifeless and mediocre.
— Joyce Rachelle
Life is a book. Keep writing your book.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one’s arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.
— Hyman G. Rickover
For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they’re best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish – we’re famous for travelling in search of adventure.
— Sara Sheridan
Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
Some days I wonder if I stopped writing about him, if I’d love him a little less.
— Dominic Riccitello
The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
— George Orwell, 1984
I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.
— Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time
Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they’re arguing.
— Adam Gopnik
I’m not a parenting expert by any means, but I’ve been interviewing and writing about kids for almost 20 years.
— Nancy Jo Sales
Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.
— Carl Henegan
Writing a novel is easy… writing checks is hard.
— Michael J. Kannengieser, The Daddy Rock
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
— Harold Pinter
Don’t fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.
— Christy Hall, The Little Silkworm
Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.
— Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
not writing is not good but trying to write when you can’t is worse.
— Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Even the pool of ink could be dried out and writing papers could be burnt to ashes forever but the spoken word will never die so as the editor.
— Euginia Herlihy
Write until it becomes as natural as breathing, write until not writing makes you anxious.
— Unknown
It is in the hard rockpile labour of seeking to win hold or deserve a reader’s interest that the pleasant agony of writing comes in.
— John Mason Brown
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
— Terry Pratchett
You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.
— Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
— Roman Payne
She would sit with picture books in her little lap before she even knew how to read, studying the writing as though all the mystery and wonder of the world were contained in the strange, indecipherable symbols.
— Molly Ringwald, When it Happens to You
My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn’t recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.
— August Wilson
[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist
One of the things I love about labeling myself as an author is that I can read books and call it “researching writing styles.”–Mike Mankoff
— Mike Mankoff
When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
— Lynn Abbey
The moment of writing is not an escape…it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
— Larry Levis
It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.
— Parnell Hall
Good writing is always new.
— A.S. Byatt, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays
There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
— David Nicholls, One Day
The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
— Beth Henley
The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
— P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters
Every word born of an inner necessity – writing must never be anything else.
— Etty Hillesum
I want to travel around the country and make my living playing music. I also try to behave in a way that I would appreciate as a music fan. That’s how we conduct ourselves, be it in writing music or playing it live.
— Buzz Osborne
If I can teach myself the art of loneliness, then perhaps the art of writing will come more easily to me.
— Nell Stevens, Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World
However, the primary job of a servant of God is to speak or to write words to convict people of God’s truth. So, in the speaking or in the writing of words, he witnesses for God.
— Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Reading and writing are not education if they do not help people to be kind to all creatures
— John Ruskin
It’s hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children’s book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.
— Adam Mansbach
When I was in college, I wrote poetry very seriously, and then once I had started writing short stories, I didn’t go back to poetry, partially because I felt like I understood how incredibly difficult it was.
— Elizabeth McCracken
A person who doesn’t have a structured way of writing their goals will experience disorder, even in the comfort zone.
— Onyi Anyado
The address given to me by Greta was written in such a way that the words looked like numbers, and the numbers looked like the aftermath of a startled octopus meeting a deep-sea diver in a corner café. It was the worst writing I had ever seen.
— Shoeburn Ruffet, Shoeburn and The Ill-Fitting Necklace
The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them.
— Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.
— James Richardson
I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
— P.G. Wodehouse
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
— Paddy Chayefsky
Storytellers think they’re writing for the audience. They’re writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.
— Chuck Wendig
I made this story up to make me feel better. Now I’m writing it down. It’s not true.
— Neil Gaiman, 9-11: September 11th 2001, Volume 2
The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.
— Chris Almeida
The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.
— Boutros Boutros-Ghali
The good writing ideas don’t have to be about political turmoil, mass killings, capitalism, racism, injustice, etc. Find that one idea that has deep roots in your heart.
— Pawan Mishra
I don’t feel comfortable doing interviews. My profession is music, and writing songs. That’s what I do. I like to do it, but I hate to talk about it.
— Van Morrison
I love using my imagination. I love writing about animals.
— Mary Pope Osborne
Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.
— Susan Orlean
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way.
— Sue Monk Kidd
The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienabl e right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.
— Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, The Edict of Religion, a Comedy, and the Story and Diary of My Imprisonment
It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man having once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task–the day’s work–and not with some enjoyment.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
There’s something to be said for writing in the morning. At other points in the day, you’re a bit more defensive.
— Alex Turner
If I had been asked to write 1, 200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it’s a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.
— Tom Stoppard
Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn’t have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn’t have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words.
— Theodore Sturgeon
My rule of writing is that no one can do what you can do, so jealousy or competitiveness are pointless. I am always happy when one of my sisters has a book published that I get to read.
— Hallie Ephron
Fruition-Think of writing as a harvest.You till the ground.Plant.Water.Wait.Apple trees take years to bear fruit.Harvest.Clean.Process.Then you have apple pie.
— Keelie Breanna
My humor tends to be a little more edgy than is appropriate for ‘Twilight, ‘ although I got some in there. That was fun! There’s just a tonal difference. For me, storytelling is storytelling. But, I do like writing for grown ups.
— Melissa Rosenberg
A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.
— Chuck Palahniuk
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain – and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
— Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning
I’ve always thought of writing as sort of active communication.
— Lily King
Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor.
— Charles Willeford
I write all these remarks with exactly the same feeling as if I were writing a letter to post into the distant past: I am so sure that everything we now take for granted is going to be utterly swept away in the next d
— Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
I don’t know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
— Jodie Foster
No, actually ‘The Host’ was totally a palate-cleanser for me. I wanted to do something a little bit different than romantic love. Romantic love is in there, obviously, because I enjoy writing about that and living it a lot.
— Stephenie Meyer
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn’t cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
— Rodman Philbrick
My mother had always taught me to write about my feelings instead of sharing really personal things with others, so I spent many evenings writing in my diary, eating everything in the kitchen and waiting for Mr. Wrong to call.
— Cathy Guisewite
The more we are willing to separate from distraction and step into the open arms of boredom, the more writing will get on the page.
— Ann Patchett, The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.
— W. H. Auden
If a problem can be solved by writing a check, it’s not a problem, it’s an expense.
— Ziad K. Abdelnour
In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.
— Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making: An Anthology
I’ve realized the most effective writing and living are done when we are willing to be vulnerable. I think we spend most of our lives trying to cover up our insecurities.
— Katie Kiesler
I was super brainy and a proper geek at school, but there would always be a boy. But that sort of obsession did turn me into a songwriter. My writing has always come from that feeling of infatuation.
— Ellie Goulding
You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
— Octavia E. Butler
For me, writing is a love-hate relationship.
— Larry Wall
I’m the most communal person that exists and a very solitary person. So I think writing is a form of getting to the community and being alone, and it’s the best of both possible worlds.
— Ariel Dorfman
Never give your opinion on someone’s writing unless they ask sincerely, and never ask for someone’s opinion unless you’re sincere.
— Justin Alcala
You keep your followers confused when you begin very well and give up too early… Suspense is useful in movies, but useless when writing your success stories!
— Israelmore Ayivor, The Great Hand Book of Quotes
I resisted writing a book for a long time because I didn’t want to invade anyone else’s privacy or hurt anyone or anger anyone.
— Alana Stewart
I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
— John Darnielle
That’s not writing that’s typing.
— Truman Capote
When I first started writing, it was me alone with a computer in my apartment. I hated the time away from other people, and my writing sucked. Now I have a laptop; I can do the most tedious part of my job in a public place.
— Chuck Palahniuk
Writing is storytelling and all of us are authors, not just of words but of reality. You are the author of your life, so go out and live! Then never quit writing about it!
— Ben Mikaelsen
MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.
— John Rember, MFA in a Box
Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off.
— Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain
I have this idea that writing is all about divergent thinking colliding with a hurricane of emotions.
— R. Y.S. Perez, I Hope You Fall in Love: Poetry Collection
i just know no one is a friend like writing .
— litymunshi
It’s easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.
— S.A. Bodeen
A person who wrote badly did better than a person who does not write at all. A bad writing can be corrected. An empty page remains an empty page.
— Israelmore Ayivor, How You Can Write Your Dream Book
For my little dog, Pip, who joined our family during the writing ofthis story. Thanks for rescuing me.
— Jackie Braun, Love Unleashed
With my sometimes blunt indecent vocabulary & very vivid imagination, I wonder if I should be writing “other” kinds of content.
— April Mae Monterrosa
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress truth.
— Wole Soyinka, Selected Poems
When someone gives you a constructive criticism about your thoughts, this strategy can help you to improve your thinking and writing skills that can result you to have more self respect for enhancing your knowledge.
— Saaif Alam
…in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
— Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays
Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It’s like I’m writing a novel.
— Andrew Shaffer, Fifty-one Shades: A Parody
I find writing very difficult. It’s hard and it hurts sometimes, and it’s scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.
— Tony Kushner
Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you’re constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.
— Meg Cabot
The thought of writing was always pleasant, but the process was painful
— Monica Ali, Brick Lane
The nature of immortality is a mystery, ‘ he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.’ But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.
— Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
The Arab World is writing a new future the pen is in our own hands.
— Abdullah II of Jordan
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
— Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.
— Steven Ramirez
Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden….
— Gerard Olson
Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.
— Charlotte Eriksson
The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.
— Mark Twain
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
— Michel Foucault
In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.
— Aysha Taryam
It was a dark and stormy night. . .perfect for staying indoors and writing a novel!
— Sandra Kopp
And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I’ll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
— Hart Crane
To me, writing is like learning to ride a bike. At first you have your training wheels on but before you know it, you have graduated to a ten speed!!
— Lorine S. Thomas, Cross Your Heart
I’m an idiot for thinking that one performance would change anything.Maybe I should stop writing songs and start writing fiction.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, Take a Bow
I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it’s no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.
— Sara Sheridan
A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.
— Don Roff
I really started writing music to challenge myself, to see what I could write.
— Amy Winehouse
For the writer, the process of writing a novel is like getting an advanced copy of a book you’d really like to read.
— Brett Armstrong
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
When you write, it’s just a much more crystalline, compressed version of the voice you think with – though not the one you speak with. I think your writing voice is your laser-guided missile. It’s the poetry part of you.
— Douglas Coupland
I stopped writing in a way they would understand because it wasn’t for them or even him. It was for I to understand, for I to make sense, and for I to let go of it.
— Dominic Riccitello
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
— Meg Cabot
It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.
— Jim Butcher, The Dresden Files: Storm Front, Volume 1- The Gathering Storm
…if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat – creativity is a rugged terrain…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
Teaching Ramanujan was like writing on a blackboard covered with excerpts from a more interesting lecture.
— Lawrence Young
I’m not gonna lie…sometimes this whole writing thing is a lonely business.
— Christy Hall, The Little Silkworm
But on the question of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please.
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
When someone gives you advice, just ask them to give it in writing and they will either keep mum or will run from there.
— Amit Kalantri
sometimes i am not sure.if i am writing the poemor the poemis writing me.
— Sanober Khan
Stay within the confines of your chosen topic. If you start to stray away from your topic and find an urge to showcase everything that you know, resist that urge. Remember that you are writing a book, not the book.
— Gudjon Bergmann, The Author’s Blueprint
It seems to me that they only seem to mention things in the Bible that are within a 5 mile radius of the guy writing it.
— Jim Jefferies
I wanted to be a Teacher with a big T: teach the whole planet. It led me into writing and speaking to large groups.
— Jack Canfield
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we’d been performing that, but we don’t do that any more.
— Fred Frith
But I’m so slow on it because I find it terribly hard writing blind on computers. The computer speaks to me, but it’s just so slow, I’m so terribly slow using it.
— Jack Vance
I would fix other people’s lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
— William Devane
When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been.
— Jennifer duBois, A Partial History of Lost Causes
Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.
— Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life
However great a man’s natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
You tend to write because your heart holds million unspoken words, writing is your only way to heal your own soul!
— Raouf Ayoub
I was kind of an outcast in school ’cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn’t know what to make of me.
— Christina Perri
Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.
— Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Did you know that writing stories down kills them?Of course it does, words aren’t meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
— Russell Baker
I’ve always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don’t think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.
— Justin Townes Earle
With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn’t respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.
— Ian Frazier
Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
— David Rakoff, Half Empty
I always loved singing and writing poetry. I always loved music, and I’ve loved writing my whole life. When I put them together, it was probably in my early 20s where I put words to music for the first time.
— Lisa Marie Presley
The United States has made a massive effort since the end of the Second World War to secure the dominance of its films in foreign markets – an achievement generally pushed home politically, by writing clauses into various treaties and aid packages.
— Fredric Jameson
[Speaking about writing her first novel] You have to be passionate enough about it and I was.
— Kristyn Van Cleave
Life is a book. Do you not realise we are writing the history of our time?
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
I recommend writing standing up from time to time. It’s easier to dance when you finish writing.
— Diego Ramos
Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.
— Akhil Sharma
Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.
— Francesca Lia Block
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
— Carl Sandburg
I am writing just to inspire you, encourage you, empower you, and give you hope when you are fighting your life’s battle.
— Debasish Mridha
Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It’s just literally never an option!
— Lillian R. Melendez
Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That’s like a sports thing, it’s not usually a comedy and writing thing.
— Louis C. K.
…no good writing flows from a polluted well – you can write about monsters, but you can’t be one…
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
— Colette, Earthly Paradise
At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
I try to combine in my paintings cinematic feeling, emotional feeling, and sometimes actually writing on the page to combine all the different elements of communication.
— Sylvester Stallone
It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
— Jonathan Franzen
I’m likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight.
— Fennel Hudson, Traditional Angling – Fennel’s Journal – No. 6
I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it’s good.
— Leigh Bardugo
Make time to write every day. The writing muscle is like any other muscle; the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes.
— Judy Penz Sheluk, Bake, Love, Write: 105 Authors Share Dessert Recipes and Advice on Love and Writing
But writing poems and letters doesn’t seem to do much good.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several bad books.
— Cara Rosalie Olsen, Awakening Foster Kelly
Writing is my passion and burns in me like a fire. I’m always writing and honing my skills to feed the flames.
— Gabriela M. Sanchez
I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man’s body.
— Christopher Stocking
When you write, it’s making a certain kind of music in your head. There’s a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I’m writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.
— Tom Stoppard
An evangelist is like a newscaster on television or a journalist writing for a newspaper . . . except that the evangelist’s mission is to tell the Good News that never changes.
— Billy Graham, Billy Graham in Quotes
I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once when I was number one on the bestseller list I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.
— Jacqueline Briskin
You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.
— L. Ron Hubbard
Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?
— J.D. Salinger
Write about fear. Write about pain. Write about heartache and resentment. Nothing worth reading comes from writing what can be said out loud.
— Alexandra Cruz
It is the kernel of truth in every story that makes its writing beautiful beyond standards.
— Psyche Roxas-Mendoza
You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.
— Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is…
At least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.
— Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit
If you can’t turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn’t be in the ad writing business at all.
— Leo Burnett
Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
— Arthur Smith
The only reason I’m writing this down is to show how human reason, even very sharp and exact human reason, can get crazily confused and thrown off the track.
— Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Yet for quixotic reasons–namely, that I enjoyed writing obits–I had decided to scale back on articles about city life in order to write exclusively about the city’s dead. For even less money. It was a strange and inexplicable career move.
— Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
— Mary Heaton Vorse
The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
— David Hare
The day when on the cover of my books, my name will appear in bigger fond than the title of my book- I will stop writing because that would be the death of the writer in me.
— Kirtida Gautam
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
— T. S. Eliot
Life is a book. We are writing the stories of our lives.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.
— Anthony Marais
The whole world’s writing novels, but nobody’s reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.
— Robert Galbraith
Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
— Stella Atrium
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