Becoming A Writer Quotes

Becoming a writer is a lifelong journey. It cannot be learned in a day or even a month or a year. We will never fully learn all there is to know about our craft, and even if we did we wouldn't realize it. We are filled with self-doubt by nature, and many of us will work our entire lives to master the art of the written word without ever recognizing the true talent we possess. Writing is a personal journey of self-discovery and growth, and should be honored as such. If you wonder about my best writing, I would say it came without warning, in moments when I was most vulnerable - with the door shut and my heart split wide open. ~ Shanda Trofe Write From The Heart

As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning. ~ Neil Gaiman

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer. ~ Chad Harbach

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions. ~ Deb Caletti

The maturing process of becoming a writer is akin to that of a harlot. First you do it for love, then for a few friends, and finally only for money. ~ Moliere

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. ~ Anne Lamott

Becoming a writer is a polite way of saying you've chosen alcoholism as a career. ~ Joe Ducie

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers. ~ Jess Walter

In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time. ~ Kate Morton

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one. ~ Paulo Coelho

I have never stopped considering not becoming a writer. ~ Joshua Ferris

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books. ~ Meg Rosoff

I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams of childhood trauma - that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing. Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force - a force so great the knife is not really cutting at all but bludgeoning and breaking (and after two or three of these gargantuan swipes it may succeed in breaking itself…which may be what happened to such disparate writers as Ross Lockridge and Robert E. Howard). Discipline and constant work are the whetstones upon which the dull knife of talent is honed until it becomes sharp enough, hopefully, to cut through even the toughest meat and gristle. No writer, painter, or actor - no artist - is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is "genius"), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude. ~ Stephen King

I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
[As quoted in the author biography on Mankell's official website.] ~ Henning Mankell

I didn't go to law school to become a lawyer, per se - let's just say I was leaning in to some strong suggestions from my parents - but my nebulous goals of someday becoming a writer were just that, nebulous. ~ Rachel Sklar

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write and keep on writing. ~ Ken MacLeod

So, instead, I give tips on how to be a professional boxer. A good diet is essential, of course, as is a daily regime of exercise. Pay attention to your footwork, it will often get you into trouble. Go down to the gym every day – every day of your life that finds you waking up capable of standing. Take every opportunity to watch a good professional fight. In fact watch as many bouts as you can, because you can even learn something from the fighters who get it wrong. Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do. And don't forget the diet and the exercise and the roadwork.

Got it? Well, becoming a writer is basically exactly the same thing, except that it isn't about boxing. ~ Terry Pratchett

Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice. ~ Shannon Hale

I first thought about becoming a writer after the age of 30, which is rather late, I'd say. In my 20s, I wasn't especially good at anything, and I didn't have a lot of experiences. I was just a young woman without a good job. ~ Natsuo Kirino

One of the biggest, and possibly the biggest, obstacle to becoming a writer ... is learning to live with the fact that the wonderful story in your head is infinitely better, truer, more moving, more fascinating, more perceptive, than anything you're going to manage to get down on paper. (And if you ever think otherwise, then you've turned into an arrogant self-satisfied prat, and should look for another job or another avocation or another weekend activity.) So you have to learn to live with the fact that you're never going to write well enough. Of course that's what keeps you trying
trying as hard as you can
which is a good thing. ~ Robin McKinley

When I was really young, I wanted to grow up and be the sun. Which shows an early penchant for ambition or narcissism or grandiosity or delusion - all of which are bellwethers for becoming a writer. ~ Gayle Forman

I'd gotten the message in my home, starting with my grandfather, that real work, the kind that makes you sweat and gets your hands dirty, is a respectable, necessary thing. But I wanted to write - and writing didn't qualify. Whenever I told my parents I dreamed of becoming a writer, they said, 'Great, but what are you going to do for work?' ~ Ali Liebegott

Why shouldn't I? I demand silently. Why shouldn't I become a famous writer? Like Norman Mailer. Or Philip Roth. And F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemmingway and all those other men. Why can't I be like them? I mean, what is the point of becoming a writer if no one reads what you've written?
Damn Viktor Greene and The New School. Why do I have to keep proving myself all of the time? Why can't I be like L'il, with everyone praising and encouraging me? Or Rainbow, with her sense of entitlement. I bet Viktor Greene never asked Rainbow why she wanted to be a writer.
Or what if-I wince-Viktor Greene is right? I'm not a writer after all. ~ Candace Bushnell

I feel like a very lucky person. From the time I was young, I had a dream of becoming a writer. Now that dream has come true, and I am able to make my living doing something I really love. ~ Bruce Coville

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. 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.
[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009] ~ Junot Diaz

I came from two harsh dictatorships, Nazi and Stalinist. I never thought of becoming a writer as such, yet in a lucid moment, I recognised what I had to do. ~ Imre Kertesz

One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic. ~ H. G. Bissinger

The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. ~ Lorrie Moore

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all. ~ Marge Piercy

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer. ~ Harlan Ellison

I dreamed of becoming a writer. And ... this dream is about to become a reality with the publication of my first, and hopefully not my last, children's book ... ~ Gloria Estefan

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism. ~ Julianna Baggott

Stephen King. Now I'm not crazy about him, but he's a great a writer. ~ Mickey Spillane

There's a fine line between imagination and reality. An inventor dreams something up, and pretty soon, it's there on the table before him. A science-fiction writer envisions another world, and then some space probe finds it. If you believe in something strongly enough, I think you can make it happen. ~ Ridley Pearson

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful ... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. ~ Doris Lessing

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful. ~ Howard Nemerov

Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely. I think of my political ideas as ideas about how I want to interact with other human beings as opposed to abstract theories about how the world should be. ~ Boots Riley

Speaking as a writer, I'm not interested in trends, I want to write books that are honest, with characters as true to the inner world of the story as I can make them. ~ Susan Patron

This principle - that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend - is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractivess will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman "lets herself go" or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart. ~ Timothy Keller

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer. ~ Rita Dove

Sanity in a writer is merely this: However stupid he may be in his private life, he never cheats in his writing. He never forgets that his audience is, at least ideally, as noble, generous, and tolerant as he is himself (or more so), and never forgets that he is writing about people, so that to turn characters to cartoons, or treat his characters as innately inferior to himself, to forget their reasons for being as they are, to treat them as brutes, is bad art. Sanity in a writer also involves taste . . . To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one's work may be dying, or have loved someone dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on . . . If there is good to be said, the writer should remember to say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. ~ John Gardner

The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel. ~ Paul G. Tremblay

I started trying to be a writer and failed for years. I tried novels, short stories, sitcoms, movies, plays, anything. And then, to support myself, I had millions of jobs on the fringes of show business. ~ Bruce Eric Kaplan

The Empire was quickly becoming the other, a featureless grey enemy that species of varied sorts would be able to stave off only if they united, all differences set aside. It was almost heartening to witness the dawn of hope, as cautious and fragile as it was. ~ James Luceno

In acting, you have a writer, a director, a character - you're working through being another person - and the irony I always tell people is when I acted early on as a teenager, it actually kept me out of trouble. ~ Juliette Lewis

You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing. ~ Eleanor Catton

I'm pretty lost in becoming all this frost. Bitter, like Winter. Strung-out like a string of pearls. ~ Ashly Lorenzana

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies. ~ Julian Barnes

His scorn of humanity grew by what it fed on; he realized in fact that the world is mostly made up of solemn humbugs and silly idiots.There was no room for doubt; he could entertain no hope of discovering in another the same aspirations and the same antipa- thies, no hope of joining forces with a mind that, like his own, should find its satisfaction in a life of studious idleness; no hope of uniting a keen and doctrinaire spirit such as his, with that of a writer and a man of learning. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that the mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. ~ Philip K. Dick

To be inspired is to feel God funnelling into one's work. We always want light from the darkness. We know something is there before we see it. The objective for a writer is to try to get some part of the face of a God on a piece of paper. It is a fearful undertaking going into something profound without knowing what you are looking for. Beauty is incomprehensible. Isn't that what God is? Witnessing the loss of beauty and the enduring effort to restore beauty, isn't this God? ~ Barry Lopez

I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died ... or worse. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Dear me, I believe I am becoming a god. An emperor ought at least to die on his feet. ~ Vespasian

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him ~ Jane Goldman

I don't really consider myself a writer. ~ George Tillman, Jr.

The writer, like a priest, must be exempted from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health; he must be at the top of his condition. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together. ~ Herbert Mason

The Writer: [voiceover] I was 12 going on 13 the first time I saw a dead human being. It happened in the summer of 1959-a long time ago, but only if you measure in terms of years. I was living in a small town in Oregon called Castle Rock. There were only twelve hundred and eighty-one people. But to me, it was the whole world. ~ Stephen King

Ever thought of becoming a wizard?' - The Good Wizard
'Not before now,' said Anya. 'I've always wanted to be a sorcerer...'
Her voice trailed off as the Good Wizard raised her eyebrows.
'But not so much anymore,' continued Anya. ~ Garth Nix

I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain. ~ Monica Ali

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time. ~ Adam Schlesinger

Of course he'll bring no money. Nor never will. He's not the type to--accumulate. But it's a good name to have. And he's becoming a personality in the county. One never knows quite why this happens, eh? Not so much what a man does. More a matter of character. ~ Winston Graham

I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter. ~ Jojo Moyes

In a 22-page comic, figuring an average of four to five panels a page and a couple of full-page shots, a writer has maybe a hundred panels at most to tell a story, so every panel he wastes conveying a.) something I already know, b.) something that's a cute gag but does nothing to reveal plot or character, or c.) something I don't need to know is a demonstration of lousy craft. ~ Mark Waid