Informational Writing Quotes

Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality. ~ Adrienne Rich

It seems important to me that beginning writers ponder this - that since 1964, I have never had a book, story or poem rejected that was not later published. If you know what you are doing, eventually you will run into an editor who knows what he/she is doing. It may take years, but never give up. Writing is a lonely business not just because you have to sit alone in a room with your machinery for hours and hours every day, month after month, year after year, but because after all the blood, sweat, toil and tears you still have to find somebody who respects what you have written enough to leave it alone and print it. And, believe me, this remains true, whether the book is your first novel or your thirty-first. ~ Joseph Hansen

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write. ~ Alberto Moravia

By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Water, like religion and ideology, has the power to move millions of people. Since the very birth of human civilization, people have moved to settle close to it. People move when there is too little of it. People move when there is too much of it. People journey down it. People write, sing and dance about it. People fight over it. And all people, everywhere and every day, need it. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. ~ Mark Twain

I write to save someone's life, probably my own ~ Clarice Lispector

When you have finished analyzing all the variations and gone along all the branches of the tree of analysis you must first of all write the move down on your score sheet, before you play it. ~ Alexander Kotov

Anyone who's familiar with my writing schedule knows that there is always plenty of time between books for me! ~ Rebecca Stead

For me, writing is immortality. It is wisdom. It is never-ending. ~ Alecia Stone

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

I associated excellence in writing with New York City. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Writing journal is for those people who find no interest in living a life of victimhood and limited personal freedom. ~ Deepak Burfiwala

I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women. ~ Curtis Sittenfeld

All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake. ~ Jean Rhys

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious. ~ Maurice Blanchot

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out. ~ Maria Semple

Writing is born out of passion and desire, but it is bred, brought up, in obsession and compulsion. Feed your drive to persist. Damn your fears. Claim your writing as your own, ~ Susan Carol Hauser

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. ~ Margaret Atwood

I don't keep up with it all. But Taylor Swift writes songs about everybody she goes out with, right? What a way to build a career. ~ Michael J. Fox

A traitor only becomes one if their plot is discovered. The imposition of guilt means nothing to those who feign loyalty. More skilled conspirators wield treason as a clinical tool of regime change and political expediency. Then, with their own hand writing history, such traitors may wear the clothes of patriots. ~ Stewart Stafford

I carry around, like, a little journal with me and just write all the time. Not necessarily, like, actually sitting down and writing lyrics - just freeform writing, whatever's going on in my mind. I write a lot on airplanes, actually, because it's completely isolating. ~ Mandy Moore

When I teach writing, I always tell my students you should assume that the audience you're writing for is smarter than you. You can't write if you don't think they're on your side, because then you start to yell at them or preach down to them. ~ Tony Kushner

When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher. ~ Frederic Chopin

All great crime writing has a strong sense of place. ~ Anonymous

We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs. Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. We had hallucinatory experiences, we watched lines leave one plateau and proceed to another like columns of tiny ants. ~ Gilles Deleuze

A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them. ~ Mac DeMarco

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline. ~ R.L. Stine

The average novel invariably reads like a detective's report. It is drab and tedious because it is never objective. ~ Soseki Natsume

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry. ~ W. H. Auden

One of the things I rarely do is write about sex. ~ Dan Chaon

I would say the songs that have different lyrics. I always write the music first, and there's a couple of songs on this box set that have different lyrics from what ended up on the final recording. ~ Billy Joel

Sometimes you have no idea what you are you doing, but you just do it anyways. And that can be a good thing ~ Anita Babic

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it. ~ Stephen J. Cannell

I thought I would write a love letter. But then, I wrote a book." - Suzy Davies, on "Johari's Window ~ Suzy Davies

Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing. ~ Alden Bell

[Speaking about writing her first novel] You have to be passionate enough about it and I was. ~ Kristyn Van Cleave

She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up. ~ Grace Paley

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I'm writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For me, a father was nothing more than a character in a fairy tale. I know fathers are not like dragons because fathers actually exist. I have seen them on television and sliding their arms around their wives in grocery stores, and I have seen them in the malls and in the coffee shops, but these were characters in other people's stories. The sad thing is, as a kid, I wondered why I couldn't have a dragon, but I never wondered why I didn't have a father. (page 20) ~ Donald Miller