On Writing Quotes

When you work on a book and you have planned everything out and you are putting flesh to an idea and a surmise that before was mainly bones something funny happens. Your brain goes into an altered state where the words you write are not quite the words you want but rather the words dictated by the task at hand. ~ David Amerland

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley ~ Nicholas Murray

The power of the delete key. ~ Buffy Andrews

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that. ~ Stephen King

[On writing biography:] If you wish to see a person you must not start by seeing through him. ~ Iris Origo

We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We write to strengthen our soul and the spirit of other souls. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. ~ Avijeet Das

Sometimes all you want to do is to keep on writing. ~ Avijeet Das

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing. ~ Elena Ferrante

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen. ~ Paul Simon

LOVE LETTERS TO YOURSELF This is taken from a love letter (a gentle reminder) I wrote to myself recently. Live in your joy today. Be authentic. Love yourself. First. Love others from your own abundance. Life Changes. Circumstances change. Sometimes you try to fit your old way of being into new circumstances rather than becoming new yourself. Embrace transformation as an opportunity. And keep on writing love letters to yourself. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Because there are a million thoughts that never sleep
and a million more that wake up as each second passes by ...
And it's insanity inside
but I can no longer keep quiet
Oh, I can't speak as well
I need to write
I have to write ... ~ Sanhita Baruah

Write what should not be forgotten. ~ Isabel Allende

It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious. ~ Ray Bradbury

I don't mind writing philosophical thoughts. If I don't want to die like one. ~ Debasish Mridha

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How. ~ James J. Kilpatrick

Your gracefulness and feminine charms always so tender, you make my heart smile and wonder! ~ Avijeet Das

The secret to good writing is to use small words for big ideas, not to use big words for small ideas. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it. ~ Thomas Harris

People approach writers, assuming we pull a perfect text out of our nose each time (well spelled). Spelling is the least of it. ~ Sara Levine

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. ~ Raymond Carver

If I could turn my thoughts into spoken words and share them with someone, they'd become real and mean something. Now, they were only lines that could be erased when I didn't feel them anymore or hopeful thoughts that, like shadows, would disappear when the sun went away. - Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines ~ Holly Michael

Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish. ~ John Jakes

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on.
-Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine ~ Oliver Harris

Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories save you. ~ Jincy Willett

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A writer writes. There are no exceptions to this reality. No excuses. Stop wasting time talking about your stories and get them on paper. ~ Christy Hall

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter. ~ Heather Sellers

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. ~ Virginia Woolf

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race. ~ William Zinsser

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay. ~ Mark Twain

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell

She: Do you always enjoy your struggle?

Me: Yes I do! There is no other meaningful way of living my life. My struggle to give voice to my thoughts is exhilarating. My struggle to channelize my thoughts to an audience is amazingly fulfilling. To write my feelings in words is greatly liberating. It is like my mind has all these thoughts and ideas that need to be shared with the esteemed audience!

She: What is your purpose of being a writer?

Me: A writer's life is a lonely life. The loneliness gives me time to be with myself. I am most happy when I am with myself. This loneliness is like my true existence. I don't need to search for a meaning in life. I have my struggle. I have a purpose. My reason for existence is my struggle to be a writer. ~ Avijeet Das

It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose. ~ Robertson Davies

We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show. ~ Annie Dillard

Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. ~ Louise Brooks

There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write. ~ M. Kirin

I am really very grateful for this Award. It is one of the first given to a woman, and to two women at that. When I first started getting work published, I used to have wistful thoughts at the way all important awards were given to men. Women, I used to think, could be as innovative, imaginative and productive as possible - and women were the ones mostly at work in the field of fantasy for children and young adults - but only let a man enter the field, and people instantly regarded what he had to say and what he did as more Important. He got respectful reviews as well as awards, even if what he was doing - which it often was - was imitating the women. But you have changed all that.
Thank you for being so enlightened.
Women, large-minded, formidable women, have played an almost exclusive part in helping my career. I have hardly ever dealt with a man - at least, when it came to publishing: ~ Diana Wynne Jones

If you've got a message, send a telegram. ~ Samuel Goldwyn

Writing is a little bit like prostitution. First you do it for love. Then you do it for a few friends. Then you do it for money. ~ Moliere

If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past. ~ James Alexander Thom

Whenever people ask me, "How are your books doing?" or, "How is your book doing?" I just say, "It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Talking aloud to oneself is usually indicative of a mental malady. Self-talk is also the stock in trade of an essay writer. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die. ~ Boria Sax

At times all you need is a bottle of fine old wine, a mellifluous piece of music playing in the background and a good book to spend the entire night in a magical bliss! ~ Avijeet Das

All throughout our lives, we selectively draw on selected shavings of life events and reflect upon them through consciousness, creating an arranged catalogue of senses, faculties, and mental activities that compose our personal life story. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The thing I most fear when writing is my paucity of ideas and the thinness of my emotional lining. I audaciously resolve to write about my greatest fears in an effort to transcend what I most despise about myself – intellectual and emotional poverty. Perchance by making use of all my thoughts and matrix of emotions – both positive and negative – I can escape the labyrinth constructed of my terrible ignorance of the world and an appalling lack of self-awareness. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Poets and writers don't live either for money or for fame. And even without any recognition for their work they keep on writing! ~ Avijeet Das

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers. ~ Dani Shapiro

I learn my world through writing. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

A person frequently writes in order to escape madness and crushing despondency by culling moral lesson and healing growth serum from personal experiences. Akin to riders on a storm, and a dog without a bone, we only come to understand our limits by enduring suffering. Only by deliberately confronting the essential facts of life does a person come to understand humanity. Without suffering the full brunt of love, sorrow, pain, illness, death, and accepting the relentless march of time a person never comes to know anything at all regarding the wonderful mystery of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. ~ Jack London

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best. ~ William Zinsser

Write like a motherfucker. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Writing is hard ... It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it's no longer a hobby, it's no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows. ~ Karina Halle

A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the gift of brilliant brevity, are hard workers, diligent scholars and competent stylists. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Climax: It's all downhill from here. ~ Buffy Andrews

Running a close second [as a writing lesson] was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. ~ Stephen King

Growing up, I used to climb out my window onto the roof and look up at the stars. There, in the quiet, I would write stories inside my head. ~ Christy Hall

The closest to my heart is not just one book - it's the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, "Gods' Food," is already available in English. ~ Sahara Sanders

I still believe in you, as a writer, but the only stuff we ever had in common doesn't travel very far."
"What stuff is that?" he'd asked her.
"We're completely at ease being naked in front of strangers and total fuckheads", she'd told him. Maybe that's part of what being a writer entails, Danny Baciagalupo found himself thinking on that rainy spring night in Iowa city. ~ John Irving

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot of thought. The pitfalls are simple: It can sound clinical or medical, which isn't right, or pornographic, because the characters disappear. ~ K.M. Soehnlein

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it! ~ Avijeet Das

Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory? ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here. ~ Donald Murray

Your writing is never as good as you hoped; but never as bad as you feared. ~ Bertrand Russell

I write because there is a madness within me to express my thoughts in words. I write because I feel passionately about certain feelings and there is this yearning within me to express these feelings in words. I am not comfortable meeting a lot of people. I like solitude. I like thinking and I dont like talking much. ~ Avijeet Das

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You'll never wish you'd held back a little more. ~ Catherynne M Valente

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

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right. ~ Amy Joy

Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if is the truth as long as it really happened. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

Writing is the knitting of the soul ~ Khaled Talib

There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart. ~ Jason E. Hodges

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination? ~ Anita Shreve

Never put off writing until you are better at it. ~ Gary Henderson

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing. ~ Bill Bryson

Scroll through a list of books online, and you will find page after page after page of book covers with shirtless guys and titles that scream BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE! or ALPHA-MALE PARANORMAL WEREWOLF ROMANCE! or something equally ridiculous. All these shitty books look like clones of each other. There's not an original thought in sight. ~ Oliver Markus Malloy

Writers allow us to see ourselves more clearly, they express spiritual signposts that assist us find ourselves. Writers' self-revelations allow us to grasp personal reflections that remain unrealized and indistinct within ourselves. Nuggets of personal perception remain veiled, until we read carefully chosen words sharing the author's crystallized perceptions. Provocative authors resolutely tap into that robust vein of common yearning and assiduously engineer their way through humankind's rampant library of collective neurosis. Reading a master's scintillating prose allows our own inchoate thoughts to shape up under the splendid beam of sunlight that they cast onto pages bearing their soul's freshly minted words. Their astutely crafted pages conveying everlasting imagery immunizes their work from the harshness of time's relentless march forward. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction - which is naive and misplaced - that being published has to do with being "good" while not being published has to do with being "amateur." ...
"Did you write today?"
"Yes."
"Then you're a writer today."
It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It's not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously.
A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final "credit" must come from. ~ Julia Cameron

Love is a poem that keeps on writing itself, sweeping us along. ~ Patricia Robin Woodruff

Don't know where to begin writing? Just throw up on paper. ~ Carolyn V. Hamilton

It's not about you, it's about the story. It's not about the folks who raise an eyebrow because you're not yet published or not yet J.K. Rowling. It's not about what that lady at church may think or, for that matter, the critics. It's not about the fact that you can't please everyone, and it's sure as heck not about the odds. In the immortal words of Gold Five, "Stay on target." You may or may not be the one who destroys the Death Star. But you're a hero if you get out of your own way, put it all on the line, and try. ~ Cynthia Leitich Smith

Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic. ~ Graham Greene

It's a funny thing about writing. You get so balled up in a story idea that you lose your perspective and forget that human being might read your words someday. ~ Gary Reilly

Never take yourself too seriously. Learn to let go and let the words flow. ~ Caron Kamps Widden

The muse is fickle; ergo, when she knocks, ANSWER! It may take a while, but trust me, she WILL knock. In the meantime, keep your ear pressed firmly to the door. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

A writer feels happy when the words connect with the reader's heart. ~ Avijeet Das

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we've thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Editing one's writing is as easy as lighting a match while riding a bicycle. ~ Fennel Hudson

Paper is more patient than people. ~ Anne Frank

Like a bird, my thoughts were flying away so I became a writer to cage my thoughts with paper and pen. You should not call me a writer but rather a catcher of thoughts. ~ Debasish Mridha

I have always enjoyed my solitude. It gives me time to think and to write. ~ Avijeet Das

[ ... ] as I have seen with other people whose sense of their work is vocational rather than pragmatic, my desire to write, to understand things at a depth I can reach in no other way, pushes me to write and go on writing, even when my wants - for an easier or more sociable life, or one less exposed and fraught - are certainly well known to my rational mind. p.293 ~ Stephanie Dowrick

Most of the ideas I've gotten for novels or screenplays have occurred to me while I was either shaving or taking a bath. A number have occurred to me while I was driving 127. I rarely get ideas when seated in front of my typewriter, which I find ironic because I have always suspected that typing somehow plays a key role in writing. ~ Gary Reilly

Being a writer is like being in a relationship. If you're not 100% committed to your writing, you will fail to be the best that you can be. ~ Patti Roberts

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself. ~ Penelope Lively