Life Writing Writer Quotes

Life has no plot. It is by far more interesting than anything you can say about it ... ~ Erica Jong

I think I'm probably going to be one of those unnoticed Authors that get discovered well after I have passed on. I better drill into my daughter now on how I want my books to be abstracted into Television or Film before it's too late lol ~ Ellie Williams

Since then, I've had these little periods when everything seems okay. I had another one last night, which I guess is why I'm writing you about this now. It's not that I don't understand that life has to continue, and it's not that I thought that there would never be a point when I could laugh easily or simply have a good time again. But these feelings don't last and they still seem unnatural to me. Not when I have them - at that point, they seem amazingly natural - but afterward. If you and I were going through this together, I'm sure we would talk about that a lot. I'd like to believe we would help each other out, that we would get through this together. ~ Michael Baron

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds - the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both - to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. ~ Anne Lamott

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. ~ William Wordsworth

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer. ~ Barry Hannah

I didn't become a writer to write about me. ~ Salman Rushdie

Depending on each other and facing the difficulties that go with it takes a lot more effort than living on your own, separated from the rest of the world. Loving each other, hurting each other, over and over, until our death. All those things that seem so normal are actually incredibly difficult. To accomplish a normal life might be an achievement as great as writing a book that goes down in history! ~ Naoyuki Ochiai

Begin to write, your heart will flow with sacred words. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

That's the thing that I've always kind of kept in the back of my head in writing about teens, that everything is so important, all the time, every day. Every day of your life, you're changing and making decisions and everything is an emergency to you. ~ Jason Katims

Every writer is a narcissist. This does not mean that he is vain; it only means that he is hopelessly self-absorbed. ~ Leo Rosten

Write your sacred story. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about in the grocery store tabloids my mom bought, situations that struck me as compelling, anecdotes I'd heard, images, words, metaphors. ~ Dan Chaon

Collaborative workshops and writers' peer groups hadn't been invented when I was young. They're a wonderful invention. They put the writer into a community of people all working at the same art, the kind of group musicians and painters and dancers have always had. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life on the page, and suddenly it all makes sense and you know what it's about and why you're doing it and what these people are saying and doing, and you get to feel like both the creator and the audience. Everything is suddenly both obvious and surprising ... and it's magic and wonderful and strange. ~ Neil Gaiman

Writing is not a great profession as a lot of writers proclaim. I write because this is something I can do. Another thing - very often I think a lot of writers write because they have failed to do other things. How many writers can't drive? A lot. They're not practical. They are not capable in everyday life. ~ Ha Jin

Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from. ~ Enya

There is nothing so inconvenient in this world as an absolutely truthful person, who can both speak and write, and has the courage of his convictions. One can always arrange matters with liars ... But with the man or woman who holds truth dearer than life, and honor more valuable than advancement, there is nothing to be done, now that governments cannot insist on the hemlock-cure, as in the case of Socrates. ~ Marie Corelli

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality. ~ Rebecca West

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading
that is a good life. ~ Annie Dillard

I am just diving into life again. I just have nothing new to offer right now as an idea for a book. I feel like if I were to write something, I would probably repeat the same idea in a different story. ~ Karan Bajaj

I feel the most alive when I write. ~ Kristy Brown

A writer lives in awe of words, for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. ~ John Steinbeck

Like to write? Of course, of course I do. I seem to live while I write - it is life, for me. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Nothing that happens is meant to happen or not meant to happen. The 'meant' is the story we tell ourselves that allows us to make sense of what is fundamentally senseless. Does this make our lives less important? Only if that's the story you want to tell yourself. Where do the stories end? They don't. It's stories all the way down. And all the way up. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

And yet, for a writer of fiction, part of the heart remains that of a stranger, for what we are trying to do is to understand those others who are our fictional characters, somehow to gain entrance to their minds and feelings, to respect them for themselves as human individuals, and to portray them as truly as we can. The whole process of fiction is a mysterious one, and a writer, however experienced, remains in some ways a perpetual amateur, or perhaps a perpetual traveller, an explorer of those inner territories, those strange lands of the heart and spirit. ~ Margaret Laurence

It is impossible to make my portrait because of my mobility. I am not photogenic because of my mobility. Peace, serenity, and integration are unknown to me. My familiar climate is anxiety. I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. ~ Anais Nin

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads. ~ Dr. Seuss

Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years! ~ Avijeet Das

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper. I've never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writer never applies to a foundation. He's too busy writing something. If he isn't first rate he fools himself by saying he hasn't got time or economic freedom. Good art can come out of thieves, bootleggers, or horse swipes. People really are afraid to find out just how much hardship and poverty they can stand. They are afraid to find out how tough they are. ~ William Faulkner

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant. ~ Regina Spektor

Where the writing takes place doesn't matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author. ~ Fennel Hudson

Writers cheat death by constructing an immortality vessel. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough. ~ Bell Hooks

Being a writer means expressing with passion your imagination, nightmares, dreams, experiences and reality through words on paper. You are a successful writer when readers criticize, get emotionally affected by, and praise your written work. As a writer, rejections are paths to success. Being prepared for it is like wearing a powerful armor in battles unknown. Continue to write. It is a writer's mighty shield and weapon. ~ Sonnia Kemmer

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

If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living. ~ Joseph Campbell

Settings are obviously important - and as a writer, you have to respect what was real at the time of the story you're writing. But the real key to success lies in finding the right characters to carry that story. ~ Joan Lingard

When we go to the Bible we should keep in mind that the basic principles of the Bible are taught by God, but written down by human beings deprived of modern day knowledge. So there is some fallibility in the writings of the Bible. But the basic principles are applicable to my life and I don't find any conflict among them. ~ Jimmy Carter

Traveling down a road of self-destruction
With no room for any reconstruction ~ Jessica-Lynn Barbour

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood. ~ Stewart Stafford

Receiving very little or no feedback from my writing I really don't know if people like it or if they are actually reading any of my work for that matter. Still I will continue to write regardless. I suppose it is similar to people who talk just to hear their own voice. I write simply to see my own thoughts in print. ~ Andrew James Pritchard

Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in.
There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley.
Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that? ~ Ridley Pearson

Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you. ~ Scott Westerfeld

Who 'waits for inspiration' has probably never explored the brain. Its much larger than the entire internet. Writing, however, is partly stalking the big wave, and ride it when it comes. However, the thousands and thousands of blokes sitting at the shoreline trying to create waves by splashing their hands in the surf - it might be what they teach at writer workshops, but the sight is absolutely ghastly. ~ Martijn Benders

Writing a memoir is a holistic method of learning and healing by placing responsibility for personal transformation on the spiritual authority of the self. Writing a person's life story is useful to gain a comprehensive understanding regarding a person's maturation, distinctive stages of personal development, and the influences provided by their family and society. The writing processes also serves as a catharsis for painful personal events that a person seeks to integrate into their transmuting being. Writing our personal story, we discover new dimensions of our being. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other. ~ Jane Austen

Writing is like wrestling; you are wrestling with ideas and with the story. There is a lot of energy required. At the same time, it is exciting. So it is both difficult and easy. What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing. I have said in the kind of exaggerated manner of writers and prophets that writing, for me, is like receiving a term of imprisonment-you know that's what you're in for, for whatever time it takes. ~ Chinua Achebe

We write from soul of the heart. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him. ~ Jenny Offill