Aspiring Writers Quotes

To all those aspiring writers who dream first and sleep later. ~ L.C. Perry

My advice to aspiring writers is to read more, write more, and network more. More, more, and more. Then, after you've done all that, do it some more. ~ Jarod Kintz

In conclusion, here's my advice to aspiring writers, journalists, and future lawyers - or anyone planning on working in the communications field: if you want an accurate account of any story, go to the primary sources. They know what really happened. ~ Simeon Wright

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences. ~ Tom Robbins

Around 1980, I'd been writing short stories, all to no success; so I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and asked "How long should it take an aspiring writer to either get published or know when to give up?" Lo and behold, King wrote back to me in long hand with blue flair pen on 14-inch paper, purveying a very nice, helpful note; in it he said my letter proved a "command of the language," that I should never give up, and that it would take years to succeed, not months. "That's cold comfort but it's the truth." This was the ultimate encouragement for a young writer to be who didn't know shit about the market. I took Mr. King's advice and actually sold my first novel little more than a year later. I'll always be copiously grateful for this advice, and it's the same advice I give aspiring writers now (along with the story of King's reply!). ~ Edward Lee

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won't let you go. It's not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you're not, nothing else that you do matters. ~ Rick Riordan

I love seeing the light go on in aspiring writers' eyes when you point out ways to improve their prose or their story - when they get it. ~ F. Paul Wilson

To aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily. If you think about it, even ten years ago or twenty years ago, there was a middle man, there was a publisher, there were studios, there was this world of rejection letters. Now, we're in a place where we have the technology and the ability to go shoot our own movies or to put stuff on YouTube or a blog, if you're a writer, or self-publish. ~ Diablo Cody

To aspiring writers, I say : Don't give up. Storytelling has been an integral part of the human condition since the beginning of time. Don't let anyone tell you your dreams don't have value. They do. ~ Beverly Jenkins

I see myself much more as a writer/director or at least an aspiring writer/director - not necessarily in film. ~ Ricky Gervais

The one thing an aspiring writer must understand is that it's hard. If you think it's not hard, you're not doing it right. ~ Gene Weingarten

I have very specific advice for aspiring writers: go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. ~ Walter Kirn

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
~ Jim Harrison

Fear of failure is the reason most often cited to explain why so many aspiring writers never realize their dreams. But I think it's that same fear of failure that absolutely invigorates those who do push through-that is, the fear of not being heard. ~ Betsy Lerner

Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur, and encourage and reassure them to continue, never to give up. ~ Patrick Modiano

My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can't go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk, talk about your interests. Writing books begins in talking about it, like most human projects, and in being close to those who have already done what you propose to do. ~ Walter Kirn

It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing. ~ John Boyne

A lot of aspiring writers are actually very talented and just have to continue polishing their craft till opportunity knocks.

All writers have to persevere, have a story they want to share and push till it's in a form others can understand and appreciate.

To my fans and readers, I love you all and say a great big THANK YOU! ~ Myne Whitman

The single best piece of advice I give to aspiring writers is to always write about things that they know. I suggest that they write about people and places and events and conflicts they are familiar with. That way their writing will be real and hopefully readers will respond to it. I try to take my own advice. ~ D.J. MacHale

I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists. ~ Sunny

Right now with blogs and the flood of internet access, a multitude of aspiring writers think they're ready for prime time. They're not. Be great. Read. Write. Bust your ass. Learn and find your voice. As hard as you think it is, it's a hundred times harder. ~ Steven Pressfield

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night. ~ Khaled Hosseini

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage. ~ Shatrujeet Nath

My advice for aspiring writers is simply this: NEVER GIVE UP. Do not let anyone tell you that you cannot achieve your dreams. If you want to be a writer, do it! Study hard to show that you have a passion for it. Read as many books as you possibly can. Attend workshops. Take classes that focus on English and writing skills. Research. Write everyday; even if it's on little napkins at restaurants. Every idea starts somewhere. Never let anyone steal your aspirations. You can do this. Just breathe and write. The rest will come to follow. ~ Rachel Nicole Wagner

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life
the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes
ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases. ~ Tom Bissell

I am dismayed to realize that much of the advice I used to parcel out to aspiring writers has passed its sell-by date. ~ Susan Orlean

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can't write - really that's exactly what you need to write. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written. ~ Ally Carter

When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category. ~ Carrie Vaughn

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.
When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann's.
Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman's frightful vision of soot and stone, worker's flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn't let the grass grow under his feet.
As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Writers are the engineers of the human souls ~ Joseph Stalin

He ascended the mountain in darkness, no lamplight, a world black and silver and blue. The moon lay scattered through the woods in blades, glowing palely, the wind rising now and again to moan through the trees. The trail scrawled ever upward, toward the looming darkness of the mountain's peak. Above it all the sea of night, the strange ornamentation of stars. ~ Taylor Brown

The Christians and the Jews do not believe that the Bible is the verbatim words of God. In fact it is clear that the books of the Bible are written by men - allegedly inspired men - but humans nonetheless. God in the Bible is spoken of in third person. This gives the believer a degree of caution. If the writers of the Bible were humans and humans are fallible, the Bible should not be taken literally. It is possible to interpret it, use one's logic to understand it in the light of science and adapt its teachings to meet the needs of the time. ~ Ali Sina

Each book is a different staging post on the writer's journey, and each book stands by itself, regardless of the writer's relationship to it. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Science Fiction has always attracted more talented writers than it could reward adequately. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

The writer's voice, the honesty and candor that is present in that voice, is what must be written upon the page. ~ Edmond Rostand

The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm. ~ Christos Tsiolkas

As writers, we can do whatever we want to. We're only limited by our imaginations. What an amazing, incredible time to be alive. How lucky we all are. ~ J.A. Konrath

Each time I write, I reaffirm my soul. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, or having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party's extension, being kept waiting all your working life - the homebound writer's irritants. But also being kept waiting is the human conditon. ~ Paul Theroux

Attention and focus are essential skills for writers in a noise-filled world. ~ Anne H. Janzer

Write the dream. Live the dream. Be the dream. ~ Adrienne Posey

I always thought that Seth [Rogen] was a fun, caustic, bombastic, sweet, underdog-type of person that I would root for the way you used to root for Bill Murray or John Candy in "Stripes." Seth had something that very few people you encounter have: he had a writer's mind and he had his own comic point of view. ~ Judd Apatow

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote. ~ Lionel Trilling

I realized early in my career that precisely what one reader
doesn't like is what another reader loves. Collectively, any writer's audience presents a mishmash of expectations that can never all be met. What one-tenth of my readership may not be crazy about the other nine-tenths savors. The moment you start altering a book or a painting or any type of art as if it's a public collaborative, you crucify its soul. I'd rather irritate a few people and delight a lot than touch no one." ~ Karen Marie Moning ~ Karen Marie Moning

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it. ~ Dorianne Laux

So, it's a delicate thing, but at the same time our producers and writers are very much aware of the potential downfall that could ensue so I think they're going to be very careful about how they do that. At the same time I don't think they want to leave the characters in the same holding pattern that they've been in for a while. I think that they're all trying to put the characters in a different situation. ~ Emily Deschanel

Every secret of a writers soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works - Virginia Woolf ~ Tracie Podger

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

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. ~ Julian Barnes

We do not wish to enter into a consideration of Free-Will, or Determinism, in this work, for various reasons. Among the many reasons, is the principal one that neither side of the controversy is entirely right - in fact, both sides are partially right, according to the Hermetic Teachings. The Principle of Polarity shows that both are but Half-Truths - the opposing poles of Truth. The Teachings are that a man may be both Free and yet bound by Necessity, depending upon the meaning of the terms, and the height of Truth from which the matter is examined. The ancient writers express the matter thus: "The further the creation is from the Centre, the more it is bound; the nearer the Centre it reaches, the nearer Free is it. ~ Three Initiates

A critic is a eunuch working in a harem. He watches it, but he knows he can't do it. Critics very often are failed writers and, like failed priests, they hate religion. ~ Howard Fast

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names. ~ Larry Niven

To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding. ~ Anatole Broyard

I'm very happy to make specific choices (as an actor), (but) you can't be married to them because you never know when the writers are going to be like, "By the way, you have no brothers, you have a sister." ~ Anna Chlumsky

Being a writer is determined more by writing than by having written. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed, ~ Dylan Thomas

We are 'writers,' we are not supposed to be interested in filthy lucre, we are supposed to be starry eyed artistes ... In Reality Land, we all want to maybe put dinner on the table once in a while, but in Fantasy Land, we are not supposed to be even interested in money because we are so caught up in the emotion of it all. That's an illusion, but people like it and it makes us feel holy or something so we all play along. ~ Max D. Adams

Rage is to writers what water is to fish. ~ Nikki Giovanni