Writers 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's my favorite part that I've written? That's like asking me to choose which of my kids is least ugly! ~ Matthew Catania

I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone. ~ Shannon Celebi

Writing is work with a purpose. Writers all throughout history labored to discover a spiritual and life-affirming means to live and attempted to share their faithful or pessimistic vision with other people. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Autobiographical writing acts as a timeless testament to each person's epic record of adventure, heartache, road to perdition, and achievement of a spiritual life devoid of the consternation, trepidation, foreboding fear, and inconsolably hankering for what is unattainable for humankind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth. ~ Marcel Proust

The most we can hope for when we write anything is dazzling imperfection. The least we can hope for is accolades from one or two people who don't know us. Spending all afternoon on "the right word" is probably foolish (though I've done it many times), but then again, it may not be. There may be people out there who'll read that nearly-perfect sentence (or paragraph), with its "right word," and they'll nod and smile and say to themselves, "Hey, that's not too bad. ~ T.M. Wright

Look seeker, if you love a character, you give them pain, ruin their lives, make them suffer. Maybe even throw in a heroic death! ~ Varric Tethras

Writing is part of life, but it is not part of the ordinary busyness of life. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven't had firsthand access to. There's an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there's also knowledge that real damage is being done - this attitude of "Oh, what the hell," this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It's an unknowingness, an unawareness ... Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things ... It's an extremely blindered experience of the world. ~ Ben Fountain

She tells me that she would not make for a good conversation. Yet every time that she talks, I don't want her to ever stop! ~ Avijeet Das

To search for an indefinable something in a world rife with photocopies is to try the unknown! ~ Avijeet Das

Once I was asked be a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight....what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughters, who wanted to be a writer. [I said], "Tell your daughter three things." Tell her to read...Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else's comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. ...Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.
Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don't necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.
Read. Find out ~ Barry Lopez

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written. ~ Dean Wesley Smith

Basically, writers write because they have something to say...Everyone has a story in them, writers merely decide to share it with the world... ~ Virginia Alison

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about. ~ Sharon Delarose

If a book falls in the woods and nobody read it, was it ever written? ~ Neil Leckman

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person's emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person's head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons' minds. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy? ~ T.C. Boyle

You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone! ~ Christy Hall

A writer's tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is easy. Writing is hard. It's a breeze and a struggle, just like life. ~ Dennis R. Miller

The very persons who have taken away my time and space are those who have given me something to say. ~ Katherine Paterson

He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossed
away from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases and assembled like a new life. ~ Jeffry R. Halverson

..here's the editor's prescription, writer: 1000 words daily until next checkup. ~ Rob Bignell, Editor

Souls are more important than stories, yes. But stories are a window to the soul. Without stories, the soul suffocates. ~ Christy Hall

And you must not worry about me. You must follow your dreams. You have your life ahead of you. I am just a wanderer passing by. ~ Avijeet Das

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect. ~ George R R Martin

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

Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning. ~ Felix J. Palma

Sometimes the writing just comes and we're like, oh yeah. Gotta love when that happens. ~ Buffy Andrews

I don't so much hope that any reader "agrees" with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called "popularization", by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter wh ~ John Steinbeck

By definition he [the writer] cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it ~ Albert Camus

Working 9 to 5 is structure. But tying lines together all hours of day is structure at its best performing magic. ~ C.C. Wyatt

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female's nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the 'Symposium' and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn't matter to me that I was reading a translation. I'd read Plato's brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn't hurt, it didn't make noise, it didn't incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one. ~ Andrea Dworkin

A cliffhanger is when ... ~ Buffy Andrews

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape. ~ Fennel Hudson

The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance. Their deeds may be small, and almost always unnoticed, unmarked by history. Their names are not remembered, nor did these authentic humans expect their names to be remembered. I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not. ~ Philip K. Dick

‪If the overuse of adjectives is frowned upon in writing, why are expletives - the ones commonly used as adjectives - embraced? ~ Carmen DeSousa