Writers And Writing Quotes

The word 'NO' is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

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

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. ~ Aberjhani

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. ~ Norman Mailer

All the information you need can be given in dialogue. ~ Elmore Leonard

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material ... .. ~ John Steinbeck

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. ~ Jane Yolen

Sometimes the novelist feels himself like God and is prepared to tell you everything about his characters; sometimes, however, he does not; and then he tells you not everything that is to be known about them but the little he knows himself; and since as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God I should not be surprised to learn that with advancing years the novelist grows less and less inclined to describe more than his own experience had given him. The first person singular is a very useful device for this limited purpose. ~ Maugham W. Somerset

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. ~ James A. Michener

Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... The wait is simply too long. ~ Leonard Bernstein

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences. ~ Anne McCaffrey

A writer is chosen by the universe to be the architect of the next generation. ~ Avijeet Das

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. ~ Sholem Asch

There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. ~ H.L. Mencken

Conflict. Conflict. Where art thou conflict? ~ Buffy Andrews

To be a decent writer you must have both empathy and imagination. While these attributes aid your art, they can plague your soul. You don't simply suffer your own sadness, experience your own longing and worry about your own wife and children, you are burdened with experiencing the emotional states of multitudes of others you don't know. ~ M.J. Rose

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing. ~ Kingsley Amis

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it. ~ Truman Capote

When you find yourself writing, reading, or listening the delivery of words when spoken? You know the melody of wordplay. "& I love Wordplay ~ Elijah Cainaan

If you are a genius, you'll make your own rules, but if not - and the odds are against it - go to your desk no matter what your mood, face the icy challenge of the paper - write. ~ J.B. Priestley

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. ~ Gore Vidal

Vengeance is ours saith the Lord and the writers. ~ Stanley Christopher

If I waited for perfection ... I would never write a word. ~ Margaret Atwood

It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends. ~ Samuel Johnson

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else. ~ Gloria Steinem

As I am a work in progress, you shall see me more or less? Don't shake me out if I digress. As of me less, from me more of my work, I guess. ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike. ~ David Foster Wallace

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up. ~ Nancy Kress

Resist the temptation to try to use dazzling style to conceal weakness of substance. ~ Stanley Schmidt

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

Writers are always selling somebody out. ~ Joan Didion

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any. ~ Russell Baker

I have written until I fell asleep with my computer on my lap. That can't be normal. ~ Christy Hall

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot! ~ Ana Claudia Antunes

A Writer Must Have Text Appeal ~ Khaled Talib

Writing is a highly encoded form of communication that takes place from one mind to another. ~ David Amerland

I'm not sure if people understand what it means to be a writer. It's not like it feels so great. I mean, most of the time you are sitting at your desk and bleeding out onto your computer screen, your notepad, your notebook ... there's a lot of bleeding that goes on when you're a writer! You don't just work to sell books, you work to bind your wounds and put your skin back together again after opening yourself up all over the place! I don't know how other writers write ... but this is how I write. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write. ~ J.B. Priestley

Being a writer brings out a sassy woman inside me, and I love her so. ~ Anna Bayes

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958) ~ Bernard Malamud

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review. ~ James Russell Lowell

I think US/UK genre has become more open to "diverse" writers and writing; there's a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it - your tastes are shaped by what you've read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There's a quite large group of people who are "yay diversity" in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, "OK, if I'm committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort" is maybe a little smaller. ~ Zen Cho

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. ~ Olin Miller

I have spent a lot of my life trying to do good and be a humanitarian, to write about difficult places, and to tell the story of oppressed peoples. ~ Andrew Solomon

I still love writing in my journal and wearing sparkly dresses and looking at old chandeliers. ~ Taylor Swift

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them. ~ Michael Dirda

The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters. ~ William Shenstone

It's only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Emma thought of Julian, sitting here, in this office. Year after year, from the time he was twelve and all scraped elbows and torn jeans. He would sit patiently with pen and ink, writing his letter to the Clave, petitioning them to let his sister Helen come home from Wrangel Island. ~ Cassandra Clare

It is difficult to be an artist, because what you can see needs to be done and what you can achieve are generally two very opposite things. The two are like yin and yang, north and south, positive and negative. What you see is just totally opposite of what the reality can be, and that's unfortunate. But there are things we can do. Writers can either repave--we fill in some of the cracks in the road that are already there--or we start to knock down some of the weeds to make a clearing in the wilderness. ~ Nikki Giovanni

I certainly don't sit down and plan a book out before I write it. There's a phrase I use called "The Valley Full of Clouds." Writing a novel is as if you are going off on a journey across a valley. The valley is full of mist, but you can see the top of a tree here and the top of another tree over there. And with any luck you can see the other side of the valley. But you cannot see down into the mist. Nevertheless, you head for the first tree. ~ Terry Pratchett

I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out. ~ Joyce Maynard

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from. ~ Ronnie Montrose

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things. ~ Octavia E. Butler

My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard. ~ James Joyce

1. Resolve today to "switch on" your success mechanism and unlock your goal-achieving mechanism by deciding exactly what you really want in life. 2. Make a list of ten goals that you want to achieve in the foreseeable future. Write them down in the present tense, as if you have already achieved them. 3. Select the one goal that could have the greatest positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it, and write it down at the top of another piece of paper. 4. Make a list of everything you could do to achieve this goal, organize it by sequence and priority, and then take action on it immediately. 5. Practice mindstorming by writing out twenty ideas that could help you achieve your most important goal, and then take action on at least one of those ideas. ~ Brian Tracy

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review. ~ Sally Rooney

The literary man has a circle of the chosen few who read him and become his only public ... What more natural than that he should write for those who, even if they do not pay him, at least understand him? ~ Amado Nervo

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. ~ David Nicholls

I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures. ~ Denise Duhamel

Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand ~ Robert Macfarlane

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action. ~ Simon McBurney

When I started writing the script I thought that maybe someone else would direct it, but then I started to fall for it so much that I left the other project and I put all my time on The German Doctor. ~ Lucia Puenzo

Just go outside and look at something and write it down and you'll find it is a very nice piece of writing. ~ John Sandford

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the 'moved' character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it's communication. ~ William L. Stull

Everybody has a talent, whether it's scrapbooking, or kite-flying, or brain surgery, or writing, everybody has a talent. And if they discover it, and they turn it to their purposes and make a living out of it, then they become not "that person," but they become "that writer" or "that doctor" or "that supervisor." ~ Harlan Ellison

I never write. Never! I do not even remember if I can write ... This is a true freestyle in general. I put a beat, I said some stuff, I retain ideas, I do it again, with a particular intonation, I test, and especially I record live. ~ Young Thug

Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing - I suppose that's what a vocation means - at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction. ~ Robert Lowell

My sister Brenda said I was more interested in the idea of writing a book than actually writing it, because if I really wanted to write, I just would, every day, by myself, for myself, whether it was a book or not. She said a writer felt compelled to write whether they had an idea or not, whether they had a computer or not, whether they had a pen and paper or not. [ ... ] I wanted to write, I just didn't know if I could, and if I ever made a start I was afraid I'd discover that I couldn't. (from How to Fall in Love) ~ Cecelia Ahern

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma. ~ Carolyn Kizer

Action is my first love. When I first started writing, my favorite movies were 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' and 'Aliens', and that sort of thing. ~ David Leslie Johnson

Unk had no way of judging the quality of the information contained in the letter. He accepted it all hungrily, uncritically. And, in accepting it, Unk gained an understanding of life that was identical with the writer's understanding of life. Unk wolfed down a philosophy. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

In other words you disappear, you become one with your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone. ~ Natalie Goldberg

My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief. ~ Isabel Allende

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this
whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Method acting has had a major influence both in writing through the eyes of other people, and seeing through the eyes of other people, trying to address different ideas in a way that would go beyond preaching to the choir. ~ Jello Biafra

Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight. ~ Nancy Lublin

I always loved animals. And when I was ten, I decided I had to go to Africa and live with animals and write books about them. ~ Jane Goodall

As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle. ~ William S. Burroughs

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper. ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. ~ Clive Barker

It takes extraordinary mental discipline to transmit human experience without perversion. Truth telling is unnatural. Lying is an important aspect of humanity. We lie to other people to prevent hurt feelings and we deceive ourselves in order to protect our noble sense of being a good person. Dishonesty and inaccuracy preserves our quest seeking uninterrupted personal pleasure. I shall eschew pleasure seeking and cultivate precision of mind and moral character that precious truth telling necessitates. Reading and writing, along with observing nature and studious reflection on vivid personal experiences is the process methodology that will bring me closest to discovering inviolate verity of existence and becoming a doyen for all the immaculate truth, beauty, and goodness in this world. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that must come out of the freezer, appointments that must be canceled or made, hairs that must be tweezed. But you hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk. ~ Anne Lamott

A writer's life is of dreams and passion, the passion that trembles to give life to the lifeless, color to the colorless landscape, so as to discover hope amid hopelessness, and it becomes a story of power and truth. ~ Jayita Bhattacharjee