Books Writing Quotes

I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do. ~ Alan Garner

People think, Hey, I love kids, I want to write children's books. But they think children are happy. That's their first mistake. [Messinger, Jonathan. "Guilt for dinner: The Mo Willems interview." Hipsqueak. 5 May 2011. Web. 18 November 2011.] ~ Mo Willems

But books don't happen by accident. ~ Scott Westerfeld

I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books. ~ Paulo Coelho

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people
men and women alike
could go on to happier, more productive lives. ~ Richard Ford

This is the best time to be an author. ~ Geraldine Solon

I figure whatever I choose to create, I'll be neglecting somebody - so my art may as well make me happy. - Audrey Niffenegger ~ Jen Campbell

If a book can save - redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane - surely, there must be a God. ~ Chila Woychik

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow. ~ Spencer Gordon

It wasn't until I started writing that I found a whole new appreciation for reading. ~ Justin Bienvenue

If a plot is a novel's skeleton, and characters are the muscle, then theme is its soul. ~ Janice Hardy

When I had my girls, I knew what magic felt like for the first time. I had created people who didn't exist before. Now I write for the same reason. Creating people and their life's stories through my writing is as close to magic as I'll ever get again. ~ Dori Ann Dupre

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about. ~ Nicole Krauss

Any book represents effort, struggle, work--I know, I write them myself--every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal. ~ Penelope Lively

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

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. ~ Walter Bagehot

Write it. Just write it. Write it on receipts in the car while you wait for your kid to finish their piano lessons, scribble on napkins at lunch with friends. Type on crappy typewriters or borrow computers if you have to. Fill notebooks with ink. Write inside your head while you're in traffic and when you're sitting in the doctor's office. Write the truth, write lies. Write the perfect spouse. Write your dreams. Write your nightmares. Write while you cry about what you're writing, write while you laugh out loud at your own words. Write until your fingers hurt, then keep writing more. Don't ever stop writing. Don't ever give up on your story, no matter what "they" say. Don't ever let anybody take away your voice. You have something to say, your soul has a story to tell. Write it. There is never any reason to be afraid. Just write it and then put it out there for the world. Shove it up a flag pole and see who salutes it. Somebody will say it's crap. So what? Somebody else will love it. And that's what writing's about. Love. Love of the art, love of the story, and love for and from the people who really understand your work. Nobody else matters. Love yourself. Love your work. Be brave. Just write. ~ Melodie Ramone

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

Reading literature and engaging in writing breaks through the mental rigidity that experience and repetition breeds. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I'm an author. We don't want to lead. We don't need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people's heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don't. We never know. We just make stuff up. ~ Neil Gaiman

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

You enter a book as if you are setting out on a journey and, if it is a good book, you will be a different person when you reach the end. ~ Chloe Thurlow

Working 9 to 5 is structure. But tying lines together all hours of day is structure at its best performing magic. ~ C.C. Wyatt

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope. ~ Stephen King

Books are gateways to other worlds; writing is a map to the undiscovered ~ Lauren Gano

The hard part is putting one word after another. ~ Jo Linsdell

Coleridge wrote a poem called 'The Eolian Harp,' in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I've read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book's writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else's writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else's structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of 'jewelled' quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass… ~ Amal El-Mohtar

Hard core authors are determined about their craft, and they know that building a brand entails hard work. They eat, breathe and live their writing.: ~ Geraldine Solon

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison

Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total world revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that writing of all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write. ~ Italo Calvino

Where do storytellers find the wisdom to discover their own stories? From no place more mysterious than their own hearts. ~ Marion Dane Bauer

Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture. ~ Jessica E. Larsen

When we sit down to write, we psychically enter a sanctuary. This safe haven is our own personal space where we can say whatever is on our mind, where we can talk about what matters most to us, where we can imagine the kind of world that we would like to live. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer. ~ Pittacus Lore

If I had a clear vision, none of my books would be what they are. I've got to let the characters show me the way. ~ Shandy L. Kurth

No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say 'No' at the same time, it sounds like neighing - yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up. ~ Hilaire Belloc

It is always good – is it not? – when all that hard work of writing pages is turned into a solid book which will last for generations. You can be proud of that. ~ Ann Swinfen

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.
- Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library ~ Phillip Lopate

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility. ~ Katherine Paterson

The writer's silent mind is a period of intermission before orchestrating a symphony of words. ~ Khaled Talib

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next. ~ Pat Conroy

LIFE IS AN ENTHUSIASM. MY EXPERIENCE OF LIFE, MY VISION ALL ARE MENTION IN MY BOOKS. WRITING LANGUAGE - MALAYALAM. I BORN AND BROUGHT UP IN KERALA. MY LIFE PERIOD MORE THAN 28 YEARS WORKING IN THE MIDDLE EAST. IN MY LIFE EXPERIENCE INVOLVED IN MY ALL LITERARY WORKS - POEMS, DRAMA, NOVELS, TRAVELOGUES, SHORT STORIES & SCREENPLAY. PLEASE READ MY BOOKS AND COMMENT IN MY FACEBOOK/TWITTER/GOOD READS ETC... I REQUEST TO ALL KERALITES BUY MY BOOKS; READ AND COMMENT IT. MY BOOKS PUBLISHER IS CYBERWIT.NET - ALL MY BRIEF MENTIONED IN THAT PAGES. ~ Saravan Maheswer

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. ~ Sarah Vowell

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real
the lives I had read about in books. ~ Dorothy Allison

An undaunted author, is the one who will succeed. There is no misfortune, that can dim their optimism. ~ Mary Sage Nguyen

If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it. ~ T.A. Uner

Attributing to another author, Writing a novel is like setting a goal and walking there in your sleep. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

I travel whenever I can - every couple of years if it is possible. I always say I'm not to write books on the countries I visit, but somehow I always seem to use material I can found in these countries in my books. ~ Ursula Torday

A person can internalize their expressible thoughts and employ such ideas to modify human behavior. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

If you are serious, and you want to make a living as an author, then you need to hustle. Period. If you can't make that quality, then you need to concentrate on your craft and practice more.
One other thing, quality comes with practice. If you are prolific, then you become a better writer because you are writing. The more you do anything the better at it you will become. So in a way, quantity does add to quality. ~ Larry Correia

I grabbed the closest box of books and heaved it onto my bed. It contained all the books I had read in Iraq. Dog-eared, with broken spines, speckled with dirt, food, and even a little blood, most of the copies were marked up with notes in the margins. The better the book, the worse it looked--that's the way it should be. As I saw it, they were almost more like diaries than books. ~ Michael Anthony

People very often say to me, 'How did you do it, how did you raise a baby and write a book?' And the answer is - I didn't do housework for four years. I am not Superwoman. And um, living in squalor, that was the answer. ~ J.K. Rowling

You can't have a conversation with your descendants when you are dead, but they can when they are alive; write a book! ~ Lamine Pearlheart

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books - not part of me, all of me - and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be. ~ Jeanette Winterson

If you spare some space for a new book, also spare some time to read it. ~ Amit Kalantri

The irony of a writer is he/she craves privacy to pen words that crave the public. ~ Alisha "Priti" Kirpalani

Your story must told.
Live a life legacy- written book or notes.
This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Half hating, half loving, this free time between writing books. ~ K.J. Mecklenfeld

Messages are the death of an honest literary transaction with children ~ Maurice Sendak

But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children's books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone's universe. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand. ~ Carla H. Krueger

As so often happens in my strange writing process, after weeks of distraction; of not thinking about the book at all; yesterday I started writing before the sun was up, or coffee was made. Whipped out a whole chapter of probably six or seven separate scenes in less than two hours. Now today, the whole story has slipped into a deeper level of knowing and connections than has (as far as I know, anyway) ever really been written about before. This is much as my experience was with Ailana, when I kept slipping into deeper and deeper gears. Bringing forth insights I myself had never learned or suspected. ~ Edward Fahey

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books. ~ Edmund White

Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages. ~ Michelle C. Hillstrom

Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage. ~ Pat Conroy

Great work doesn't make me jealous; it makes me want to work. ~ Glen Hirshberg

I live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant. ~ Oriana Fallaci

Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use
high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject
there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical. ~ Richard Rodriguez

They look, I said. They look in all our rooms.
What for? he said.
I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said, Books, writing, black market stuff. All things we aren't supposed to have. ~ Margaret Atwood

The only difference between writers and people who don't write is that writers aren't afraid to display their demons. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation ~ Karl Wiggins

Stories trace their roots to impassioned human interactions with the world. I always sense a storyline as an emotional yearning embedded in a deep fissure waiting to erupt. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I only write books about dead people. They can't sue. ~ Pierre Berton

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly. ~ Rebecca Solnit

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same. ~ Cameron Dokey

And above all, you should not think of writing as a way of earning your living. If you do, your work will smell of your poverty. It will be colored by your weakness and be as thin as your hunger. There are other trades which you can take up: make boots, not books. ~ Marquis De Sade

Reading, writing, listening to music, skipping rope, flying kites, taking long walks along the sea, hiking in the crisp mountain air, all serve a joint purpose: these self-initiated acts free us from the drudgery of life. These forms of physical and mental exercises release the mind to roam uninhibited, such collaborative types of mind and body actions take people away from their physical pains and emotional grievances. A reprieve from the crippling grind of sameness allows personal imagination to soar. Imagination, a form of dreaming, is inherently pleasant and restorative. It is within these moments of personal introspection stolen from the industry of surviving that humankind touches upon the absolute truth of life: that there must be something more to living then merely getting by; the fundamental human condition thirsts for a way to improve upon the vestment that shelters our self-absorbed lives. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. ~ Noah Lukeman

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought. ~ Nell Freudenberger

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable - we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job. ~ Jeanette Winterson

It is uphill work writing books ~ Charles Darwin

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police. ~ Peter Selgin

Writing picture books is like playing Tetris with only Z-pieces. ~ Colleen A.F. Venable

every word and its sound shall generate the same form in the mind of both the reader and its author ~ R.K. Shailey

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter! ~ Roberto Bolano

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

...books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic. ~ Alexander Chee

Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements. ~ Guy Kawasaki

Dreams are there for those who dare to dream them. ~ R.K. King

Every book I've read appears in my writing. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature - at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes - is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune. ~ Lewis Carroll

You're the one who says books have to be heavy because the whole world's inside of them, said Meggie ... ~ Cornelia Funke

A book lives a new life every time it is read. ~ Brandon Sanderson

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud. ~ Louis Sachar

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it's halfway to being just like every other bloody book that's ever been written. ~ Robert Harris