The Writing Life Quotes

Whether you're conducting phone interviews or simply need to hear yourself think, privacy is an extremely important variable in the writing life. ~ Sage Cohen

I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch. ~ Jeanne Marie Laskas

All my children inspire me in life, and that always comes out in the writing. ~ Paul Weller

Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks. ~ Pat Conroy

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not. ~ Jayne Anne Phillips

Alertness is a requirement of the writing life, staying nimble on your feet, open to the stories that will rise up and flower around you while you are walking your dog on the beach or taking the kids to soccer practice. The great stories often make their approach with misdirection, camouflage, or smoke screens to hide their passage through your life. ~ Pat Conroy

I shall wish her well and be the first to welcome her to "the writing life," which, despite its horrors, is possibly one of the few sorts of lives worth living at all. ~ Julie Schumacher

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know - if we know anything at all - is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt - spectacularly, brazenly - into the unknown. ~ Dani Shapiro

Persistence is worth at least as much as talent. The writing life is not a series of gentle encouragements. It's more like a series of brutal kicks in the teeth. Those who grow a thick enough skin to persevere, survive. Those who do not, do not. ~ Gardner Dozois

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime. ~ Dani Shapiro

The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people's hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people's minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul's shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you're working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. ~ Andrew Klavan

When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, "I kill people." This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from my seat-mate. Only peace and quiet. Rare is the fellow passenger who asks why I do it.

I suppose I got tired hanging out in a book all day waiting for a story to begin. I write the kind of novels I want to read. And why the theme of solving murders? Violent death is larger than life and it's the great equalizer. By law, every victim is entitled to a paladin and a chase, else life would be cheapened.

And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life. If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum... but I have never done that.

The heart of my theory has puritan roots: if you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work. ~ Carol O'Connell

F you want to be famous then run for office and be a politician. If you want to be rich then become a plastic surgeon. If you want to have people know your name then be a teacher. If you want to make a difference in someone's life then have children. But if you want to work alone, feel like a freak, be misunderstood, wonder what the point is, always come up short of time and money, while writing stories that bubble up from within about characters you have never met but are strangely in love with, then be a writer. ~ Karen Jones Gowen

I'm amazed at how much my writing is improved when I step away from the computer, even in small amounts. If I'm stuck, I vacuum the living room or walk the dog. I'm amazed at what comes out of that ... We have to realize that part of the writing life where we're sitting down at the computer is harvesting the crops, but you have to have planted them and watered them and created fertile soil - and that's a life. ~ Donald Miller

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

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply. ~ Will Self

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too. ~ Annie Dillard

Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something. ~ Paul Theroux

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

One of the things that made me try writing novels was I could take time off to be with the kids. That's the practical side of what I love about the writing life. ~ Simon Toyne

I talk about any number of things on my Facebook space. Politics. Current events. The writing life. The latest tempests in a teapot centering on fandom. Daily doings from my own life. My cats, for crying out loud. Flights of humorous fantasy. Books, both those I've read and those I've written. Movies. And occasionally, TV shows. ~ Adam-Troy Castro

To unfold any number of ideas through all the dimensions of time is the great adventure of the writing life. But I had nowhere to write. ~ Deborah Levy

The writing life is punctuated by words, sentences, paragraph & pages. And by spurts of elation, inspiration, rejection & despair. ~ Mark Rubinstein

Most fundamentally, I used to write because I received positive feedback. To a guy who was picked on pretty relentlessly through a lot of his childhood, the respect and affection of students and teachers is addictive. It was a couple years after grad school that I realized that a need for affirmation wasn't a good enough reason to keep writing, especially in the face of rejection after rejection after even personal rejection, and that if I was going to do it, I had to acknowledge that it was going to take my whole life. The decision to do it until I'm dead has made the writing and the writing life so much easier. ~ Donald Dunbar

Lehman uses many conveyances - including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes - to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity. ~ Ken Tucker

The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse. ~ Miriam Toews

Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least. ~ Alice McDermott

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words like "surprisingly," "predictably" and "of course," which put a value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your material. ~ William Zinsser

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.
This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you. ~ Annie Dillard

On economic matters Garrett had a brilliant simplicity. In November 1913, while editor of the Annalist, he began a monthly column on money in Everybody's, writing as John Parr. One of the most common questions from readers was why the government simply didn't print money to spend on public works, instead of borrowing it at interest. It was a variant of the Coxey idea. Garrett explained that money is not wealth, but a claim on wealth, and that you do not add to wealth by creating more claims to it.4 ~ Bruce Ramsey

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO
DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see. ~ James Joyce

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought. ~ Iris Murdoch

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything. ~ Andre Breton

Any curly-haired boy can write windswept ballads. You have to crush people's heads. That's the only way to make those fuckers listen. ~ Don DeLillo

I do play all the characters, when I write them, one after another. If they actually had to film me, the only one I could play would be Samwell Tarly or Hot Pie. ~ George R R Martin

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry. ~ May Sarton

From very early on, I've realized that and I have a mission statement with my songs to entertain, to encourage and to challenge the Body of Christ. That's always kind of the focus of the songs that I write for myself. ~ Jonny Diaz

By the way, Doc Edwards said. How's that book coming along?
Oh, it's coming along.
Fine. What's it about?
Just what I'm writing down: one word after another.
Good. ~ Richard Brautigan

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview] ~ Ray Bradbury

I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene. ~ Oliver Markus

For whatever reason, thus far it's been important to me not to write that kind of collection. Which means that I've spent months playing tic-tac-notecard, trying to get the stories in an order whereby stories that are similar in any given way (diction, narrative stance, setting, plot) are separated by others that aren't. ~ Roy Kesey

But the real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is to enrich: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought of including them in your worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. ~ Ken Wilber

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum. ~ Andrew Bird

Like anything else that happens on its own, the act of writing is beyond currency. Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process. ~ Stephen King

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. ~ Richard Chenevix Trench

I'm coming from a place that's more experimental and indulgent already, so for the last 10 years, it's been more like, "How can I defend my own sensibilities by writing a nugget of a little catchy pop song?" That's how I'm stretching myself, by writing something really simple. ~ Andrew Bird

I go to bed and then that man sits in
the next room and continues laughing about his own writing. And then I knock at the door, and I say, now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing. ~ Nora Barnacle

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote it as a story. As a teenager, I didn't have any skills for writing as such, so it came out in 1500 words. ~ Theodore Sturgeon

I listen to the Mars Volta and Fiona Apple every day. I feel if you do write music, you write what you listen to, and you couldn't possibly write in another genre. So those are the two that I usually use. ~ Christian Serratos

(Slap) "Owhhh ... " Raymond yelled as the Old Man's cane hit his face. ~ Judy Byington

The second thing you have to do to be a writer is to keep on writing. Don't listen to people who tell you that very few people get published and you won't be one of them. Don't listen to your friend who says you are better that Tolkien and don't have to try any more. Keep writing, keep faith in the idea that you have unique stories to tell, and tell them. I meet far too many people who are going to be writers 'someday.' When they are out of high school, when they've finished college, after the wedding, when the kids are older, after I retire ... That is such a trap You will never have any more free time than you do right now. So, whether you are 12 or 70, you should sit down today and start being a writer if that is what you want to do. You might have to write on a notebook while your kids are playing on the swings or write in your car on your coffee break. That's okay. I think we've all 'been there, done that.' It all starts with the writing. ~ Robin Hobb

All the time I was writing hit songs with my partner David Porter, I always had the yen to perform. Sure did. And when the opportunity came, I took it. The first album, 'Presenting Isaac Hayes,' didn't do so hot, but it was like a prelude for what was to come. ~ Isaac Hayes

So one can lose a good idea
by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides
it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations
are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does
recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier. ~ John Ashbery

If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that. ~ Julian Barnes

Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form. ~ Matthea Harvey

I thought a bit of poetry might be interesting - I even write a few lines myself. I composed a short poem for my mum's 70th birthday recently. When I recited it I saw the glint of a tear in her eye ... although I guess it wasn't the quality of the poetry was that making her cry! ~ Iain Dowie

The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do. ~ William Zinsser

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don't live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten. ~ Marie Howe

The track of writing is straight and crooked. ~ Heraclitus

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold. ~ Milan Kundera

Where do you get the inspiration for your books?
I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I've thought of an idea. ~ Douglas Adams

Brandon: How does the character fit into the story, how will people expect them to fit into the story, and how, therefore, can I make them incongruous for those expectations? I'm looking for incongruity. Ask yourself why this character cannot fill the role in the plot that they are expected to fulfill. Ask yourself who would be perfect for this role. I'm not going to use that person. ~ Brandon Sanderson