Writer Habits Quotes

The best thing about being a writer is that 'work' is always something you love, plus usually accompanied by tea, coffee and cakes of some sort. ~ Jamie L. Harding

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life. ~ Miguel Syjuco

I love people and psychology. As a writer, I'm not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred's soul and play there. ~ Dorianne Laux

It is more worthy in the eyes of God ... if a writer makes three pages sharp and funny about the lives of geese than to make three hundred fat and flabby about God or the American people. ~ Garrison Keillor

Most people put off my mother's erratic behavior to the fact that she was a writer, as if that just explained everything. To me that was just an excuse. I mean, brain surgeons can be crazy too, but no one says that's all right. Fortunately for my mother, I am alone in this opinion. ~ Sarah Dessen

A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink. ~ Edward Abbey

I see the game now. You can't write with ink, and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of some one else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist.

O'Henry 'The Plutonian Fire' (1905) ~ O. Henry

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it. ~ Colum McCann

Actors want to act. I think a lot of times what happens is that they're expected to bring it all. Probably because I'm a writer, I'm not telling them what to do. I just provide them with as much as I can. ~ David Ayer

Julie-Ann and Amber - I appreciate you ladies so much. I'd be lost without you both. Then thanks are due to the fabulous Ink Ladies and the many wonderful writer friends ~ Tracey Alvarez

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know. ~ Peter Shaffer

Failure is to form habits ~ Oscar Wilde

So why has this potentially self-destructive system of economic arrangements lasted? Probably because of habits of restraint, honesty and moderation which accompanied its emergence. ~ Tony Judt

Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic. ~ T.F. Hodge

To be a great writer you must be fearless with your words. ~ Karmel Graham

Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore... ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking, and make less impulse decisions than most people in business. I do it because I like this kind of life. ~ Warren Buffett

Life really is a practice and becomes what you practice. ~ Akiroq Brost

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac. ~ Saul Bellow

I nurture daily wellness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. ~ Lynn Coady

If a philosophical writer cannot be followed, the difficulty of his subject can be placed only in mitigation of his offense, not in condonation of it. There are too many expert witnesses on the other side. ~ William Zinsser

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money. ~ Robert Harris

... but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against 'individualism' and 'the ivory tower', no pious platitudes to the effect that 'true individuality is only attained through identification with the community', can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind ~ George Orwell

A man friends are more capable of working him harm than strangers; and his greatest
danger lies in his own habits. ~ Aleister Crowley

No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. ~ Jonathan Lethem

When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

A dojo [pracice hall] is a miniature cosmos where we make contact with ourselves - our fears, anxieties, reactions, and habits. It is an arena of confined conflict where we confront an opponent who is not an opponent but rather a partner engaged in helping us understand ourselves more fully. ~ Joe Hyams

My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them. ~ Victoria Aveyard

i overthink.
i overlove.
i over feel.

i am the sea
or i am nothing. ~ Juansen Dizon

As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw. ~ Alice McDermott

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different. ~ Cyril Connolly

I am a person always full of contradictions ... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer. ~ Ba Jin

The usefulness of a man or woman of God relies on the ability to remain distinct. ~ Kevin Thoman

It is difficult for a fool's habits to change to selflessness. ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo

There's some instinctive attraction that draws you, as a writer, to your subject. And the attraction usually has to do with some primal personal thing that, of course, you have no idea about. In the end, the piece always comes down to the one or two sentences you struggle over. The sentences where you try to say explicitly what it is that the two of you, subject and writer, have in common. Those are the sentences that you just bang your head against the wall over until you get them right. It's very hard to make that distillation but that is actually what your job is. Without trying to pin the person like a butterfly to the wall, to sum it up. If I can do that, then I feel satisfied. To give the subject a reality in the form of a sentence that is like a piece of rock crystal or a prism. ~ Judith Thurman