Writers Life Quotes

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

The power of the delete key. ~ Buffy Andrews

It's plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we're literary Gypsies, all of us, and it's only recently that we're starting to realise we're not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked.

I've always loved wild people. ~ Karl Wiggins

All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash) ~ Larry Brown

In general, though, one should never forget the role money plays in shaping the writer's life, and the life inevitably informs the work. My own position is that I always want to convince a publisher to give me adequate money for what I want to do. At the same time, what I want to do is to arrive at full expression in a way that seduces, that pleases people in a way they didn't expect to be pleased, or even want to be pleased. ~ Tim Parks

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

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

Let you light shine from the inside out. ~ Juliet M. Sampson

Whatever part drink may play in the writer's life, it must play none in his or her work. ~ Kingsley Amis

There's nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself. Professor Piper ~ Rainbow Rowell

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

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

Life is a helluva journey. You face situations. You meet people. You try to understand situations. You try to understand people.
But you will never ever be able to understand people. You will never ever be able to understand why some things happen.

You feel you desperately need someone to support. But you won't find any support. You feel you need an anchor amidst the unpredictably nature of life. But there won't be an anchor. And you will feel your feet are losing their balance. You will feel you are falling down. You will feel the weight of life pulling you down. And you are drowning in the ocean. And you are shouting for help. But nobody can hear you because everybody is busy living their life to listen to you.

You thus you give up on people. You lose faith in people. You lose faith on life.

You just go on living life without feeling anything. You live life in a state of numbness and indifference.

And then one day you look at yourself in the mirror, and you have become a stranger to yourself! ~ Avijeet Das

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

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

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

Penning an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus, [Strayed] worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readings suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience ... Moving ... compassionate. ~ Leigh Newman

Every life is a tragedy, but far more the writer's life, because the more he has to see, the more deeply he understands and feels about life, the less time he has to put it down. ~ Gabrielle Roy

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

You now get to decide for yourself just what the scope and clarity of your brilliance can be….This is the writer's life. And for this there is no teacher left. So go for it. Wow yourself. ~ Scott Herndon

Creative people need strong encouragement. ~ Fennel Hudson

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

My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Days may pass into months, months may pass into years, and years may pass into decades, but I will always keep waiting for you. ~ Avijeet Das

Readers," continued Miss Winter, "are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work. ~ Diane Setterfield

An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it. ~ Nick Harkaway

What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive. ~ Susan Sontag

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do. ~ Tom Paulin

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

You heard me cry long before I knew my voice. ~ A.D. Posey

The principal aim underlying this work is to render homage where homage is due, a task which I know beforehand is impossible of accomplishment. Were I to do it properly, I would have to get down on my knees and thank each blade of grass for rearing its head. What chiefly motivates me in this vain task is the fact that in general we know all too little about the influences which shape a writer's life and work. The critic, in his pompous conceit and arrogance, distorts the true picture beyond all recognition. The author, however truthful he may think himself to be, inevitably disguises the picture. The psychologist, with his single-track view of things, only deepens the blur. As author, I do not think myself an exception to the rule. I, too, am guilty of altering, distorting and disguising the facts - if 'facts' there be. My conscious effort, however, has been - perhaps to a fault– in the opposite direction. I am on the side of revelation, if not always on the side of beauty, truth, wisdom, harmony and ever-evolving perfection. In this work I am throwing out fresh data, to be judged and analyzed, or accepted and enjoyed for enjoyment's sake. Naturally I cannot write about all the books, or even all the significant ones, which I have read in the course of my life. But I do intend to go on writing about books and authors until I have exhausted the importance (for me) of this domain of reality.

To have undertaken the thankless task of listing all the books I can rec ~ Henry Miller

A writer's life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct. ~ Mavis Gallant

Imaginative writers often project their own monsters and meanings on basic facts. ~ Christopher Bram

If you write a bad book, mobs do not show up with pitchforks and torches - and odds are you didn't write something bad. ~ Dan Alatorre

You can ask somebody just about anything if you say you're a writer first. ~ Dan Alatorre

The last chapter in 'Alice in Worcestershire' is called 'Writing the book'.
I started to write that 'Diary' chapter at the very beginning of the process and followed it through to the end... speaking to the reader.

My decision to do this was because I've often read autobiographies and wondered how the author felt and how it impacted them writing about painful memories that had been locked away in a deep forgotten place.
I wanted to know what was going in their 'present' life while they were writing; about the struggle with sharing their inner secrets and... I'm... inquisitive. (nosy)!

It took me over five years to finish 'Alice in Worcestershire' because sometimes, I was simply too drained to continue. Periodically, I updated the 'Diary' chapter and, thankfully, it's enthusiastically appreciated by readers. ~ Eskay Teel

Contemplating while barefoot on the grounds my father and grandfather walked, I saw my life clearly. With African sun nibbling on my dark skin and gentle winds soothing my foreboding, my past life and current responsibilities overwhelmed me occasionally. Abundant tears flowed freely. Dripping on my face and clothes. Travelling through the ancient roads created by my forefathers, grasslands, trees and anthills kept me company. A lonely journey. I knew that nothing remains the same, but ones past never changes. Even in the loneliness of my past, I accepted that you cannot effectively go forward without knowing how and where you started your journey. Even in that state of near dejection I was aware that my sojourn in foreign lands is not forever, but my lording of this beautiful land, my own Africa, where my spent body will finally rest someday, is for eternity. Nothing remains the same, but nothing ever changes. It depends on how you look at your life. ~ Fidelis O. Mkparu

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject? ~ Slash Coleman

If I write as well as I golf, I'm in trouble! ~ Buffy Andrews

A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity. ~ Toni Morrison

Remember once you have your dream, write it down! ~ Samuel Colbran

My father had an invisible job outside of the house; I didn't know what he did. But my kids were privy to the ups and downs of a writer's life. ~ Paul Theroux

I think the best thing about being a writer is getting to dream. It's constantly viewing life through the "what if?" lens. ~ Kevin J. Fitzgerald

The divine thoughts comes from God, we are only vessel for its transmission. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The worst reviews, by my mind, are those from individuals who enjoy entertaining themselves by writing something bad about books they actually never read, which is as clear as day from what they're saying. It's even more puzzling for an author to check some of these "honest" reviewers' pages and see that they created their profile with one goal in mind; to post you a bad review, as there's nothing else they wanted to rate. ~ Sahara Sanders

Let your light shine from the inside out. ~ Juliet M Sampson

Artistes are true muses of each other! ~ Avijeet Das

The real duty of a motivational speaker and an inspirational writer must be to inspire lives to live and leave distinctive footprints which shall qualify such lives to eternal eternity in the Kingdom of God notwithstanding how minute or great the footprints might be ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

We had the longest kisses under the Acacia tree. ~ Avijeet Das

Creativity bleeds from the pen of inspiration. ~ T.N. Suarez

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

A cliffhanger is when ... ~ Buffy Andrews

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.' ~ Dani Shapiro

I hear you in the morning sun. ~ A.D. Posey

It's much more important to write than to be written about. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments ~ Manjula Martin

When I first started following writers on social media, I imagined a deluge of profound quotes, writing tips and insights into the plight of wordsmiths. There was some of that. Mostly though, my timeline was taken up with their obsession with coffee: 'I want coffee/I'm having coffee/I've had coffee.' Then came photos of their favourite coffee mug/pot/shop/barista. So, if you've enjoyed a recently-published book, give credit to writers: the vampiric aficionados of the coffee cherry. ~ Stewart Stafford

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books ... My mind is a body that's a mind. ~ Sergio Troncoso

The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life. ~ Julian Barnes

For some reason, when people meet me and find out I'm a writer they always ask if I write children's books. Um ... please don't let your kids read my books. Well, unless your kids are in their 30s or something ... then yeah, they're old enough. LOL ~ Michelle M. Pillow

I write the words God put on my mind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All wdl be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end T o the vanity of our c a h g : make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Because the darkness is never so distant,
And there is never much time for the arrogant
Spirit to flutter its wings,
Or the broken bone to rejoice, or the cruel to cry,
For Him whose property is always to have mercy, the author
And giver of all good things.

W.H. Auden, "At the Grave of Henry James ~ W. H. Auden

Does talking to yourself in the voice of your fictional character count as being social? ~ Michelle M. Pillow

As a form of body language, when the mind is receptive to the sensory experience, writing speaks the truth about all thoughts and feelings. Now I don't want to be misunderstood here because this isn't a special talent or skill. It's present in all of us. The trick is to discover it, cultivate it and translate it from an internal state to an expressive sensuality. It is truly a creative impulse that unconsciously expresses emotions and can also arouse emotion in the person reading the book. The beauty and harmony of the writer never gets old and there are as many new things to learn each day, as there are varieties of adjectives, nouns and verbs in the world. It is the ultimate way to communicate with your reader. ~ Karl Wiggins

. . .In a heartbeat, you will fall right into that novel, that poem, the story that you are most in love with right now. When you learn to be able to decide in the moment to take breaks from your internal voices - even though it's only for a split second - you will be taking your first baby steps toward the full-out exhilaration of living in the midst of the wholly realized writer's life.

Then all the negatives - yes, even your cherished writer's block ego trip - will fade into background noise, then you will find silence, and your story will take over. Before you know it, you will be working calmly and clearly for hours, rather than for a couple minutes.

1 hour, not 1 second, 2 hours, not 2 seconds, 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 hours of allowing your mind to come to rest from the horrid, every day, mental chatter we lock ourselves up with - a time to anchor within the natural spaciousness that you already know instinctively, know from deep within will make you feel full inside. . . . ~ Terry Kennedy

She never claimed to be a writer, she simply described herself as a typist of stories waiting to come alive. ~ Margareth Stewart

You ought to stop everything and write the sacred-words as its flashes in your mind. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents' house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer. ~ Sahara Sanders

The writer's life is a sacred wonder. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The toughest/most challenging journey in writer's life ___ the journey of ideas/stories from the writer's head to word document. ~ Tarang Sinha

Each night, I close my eyes and dream. In the morning, I open my eyes again, but the dreaming doesn't stop. ~ Christy Hall

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

I have voices in my head
I'm a slave to imaginary people
I feel what they feel
I experience what they experience
I live in their world
And I'm devoted to translating their stories
I'm not crazy, I'm a writer ~ Charisse Spiers

I think one of the best gifts you could offer me, as a writer, is to engage with my words, to tell me how they felt to you. To let me, for a moment, see my words through your eyes. And it feels like you read my words so carefully, that you were gentle with them, nurturing. I feel loved and seen by the way you responded. Thank you for caring for the words that rise from my soul. ~ Ashley Asti

Me to characters: talk to me people. ~ Buffy Andrews

And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long.

On Starvation Ridge
little sticks
Are trying to grow. ~ Jack Kerouac

There's this great Ron Carlson story, "A Note on the Type," and it's about this guy who keeps escaping from prison. He's really good at escaping, but he gets caught all the time, because he can't stop writing his name on underpasses where he's running from the law. And there's this whole beautiful paragraph about how to run is to write. And, you know, it's obviously about the writer's life. ~ Pam Houston

I believe the best reviews are any of those wherein readers share their true opinion, no matter how many stars they rate my work. When I receive responses from appreciative people thanking for useful and amusing reading, it feels like my wings stretch up and blood carries the highest happiness circulating in my veins. I think many writers will understand what I mean by that. ~ Sahara Sanders

Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life ~ Jerzy Kosinski

There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. ~ John Updike

By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I walk around engrossed in my stories and worlds, and I love losing myself in them! ~ Samuel Colbran

If rejections were cash, I'd be rich ~ Buffy Andrews

I am so over you, Rejection. You can't get to me like that anymore. I won't let you squash my hopes and dreams. (Slams door) So there! ~ Buffy Andrews

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life. ~ Mark Leyner

Reading is the creative center of a writer's life. - ~ Stephen King

I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. ~ Joan Didion

For most writers, reading is also a very intense experience; they don't read so much as compete. The writer measure's himself against every text he encounters, imagining he could do it better or wishing he had thought of it first. The natural writer would almost always rather be reading, writing, or alone, except of course when he needs to come up for air (that is, for subject matter, food, sex, love, attention). He may be a selfish son of a bitch, he may seem to care more about his work than about the people in his life, he may be a social misfit, a freak, or a smooth operator, but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood. Indeed, the great paradox of the writer's life is how much time he spends alone trying to connect with other people. ~ Betsy Lerner

I regretted the solitary nature of the writer's life - other people, normal working people, spent their days with co-workers, rode the subway home with a crowd, walked through thronged streets. I worked at home, all by myself. ~ Kate Christensen

I think the low emotional moments happen for every author. This is the time to find a sturdy mental ballast & realize self-doubt storms pass--you know, the same way hurricanes do. ~ Rebecca Taylor

He understood the language of the trees. He spoke to the trees and they spoke back to him! ~ Avijeet Das

But what is life without a passion? ~ Avijeet Das

I love Edit. He gives me tons of second chances to make things just right between us. ~ Buffy Andrews

To produce new works a writer will use a kind of sixth sense as well as the logical process. He'll enjoy playing with words, and that'll help his brain to relax and produce better ideas. His study is where he discovers order and finds hidden meanings in the words. He'll enjoy expanding the boundaries of what is feasible, and is possibly motivated more by the writing itself than by the hard cash that is the reward for writing. ~ Karl Wiggins

[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and can flatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this 'me' which like knowledge, which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it. In the same way, I like certain biographical features which, in a writer's life, delight me as much as certain photographs; I have called these features 'biographemes'; Photography has the same relation to History that the biographeme has to biography. ~ Roland Barthes

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma ... ~ R.D. Ronald

The writer's life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. ~ Dani Shapiro