Writing Confidence Quotes

I don't read reviews if I know in advance they're negative, because I can't have my confidence undermined when I'm writing. ~ Christopher Moore

Subtlety is the mark of confidence and is thus by far the hardest thing for a writer to achieve. ~ Noah Lukeman

Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word. ~ Jill Scott

I use a computer, but before I begin each new book I keep a notebook. I write down everything that comes to mind during that period before I actually begin. It might take months or weeks. That notebook is my security blanket so that I never have to face a blank screen (or blank page). But I print out often and my best ideas usually come with a pencil in my hand. ~ Judy Blume

I keep writing children's books, I keep making children's books, because I still have them inside of me. ~ Oliver Jeffers

As opposed to putting too much confidence in myself, or in an image or a scene or a set of brushes, I really want to allow the oil paint to perform, to show me the things that it wants to do, beyond my imagination. ~ Dan Colen

Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. You can create little islands of time away from your novel that will help preserve your balance. Exhaustion will affect both your writing's quality and your productivity. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it. ~ Edward Hirsch

I'm happy when I write. I've written my first novel, my pencil is down. My last work has been written. No turning back. No more hesitation. I'm writing my future one page at a time. Inspire. Dream. Live. Breath. Happy. Succeed. ~ Missy Salick

Maybe being oneself is an acquired taste. For a writer it's a big deal to bow
or kneel or get knocked down
to the fact that you are going to write your own books and not somebody else's. Not even those books of the somebody else you thought it was your express business to spruce yourself up to be. ~ Patricia Hampl

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice. ~ Phil Cousineau

I never want to deal with a book once I'm finished writing. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn. ~ Donna Lynn Hope

Don't fake enthusiasms. Say what you think, not what you think you ought to think. ~ Darcy O'Brien

In the end, you have to just sit down, shut up, and write. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I really don't write much anymore, and I'm not uncomfortable with that. I've tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don't want to go on. ~ Lawrence Block

If all shy, soulful young women who dreamed of becoming writers for a living actually could do that, imagine the library we would have. ~ Sarah Elwell

Any academic skill is quickly achievable if charged with clear purpose and an appeal to enthusiastic self-interest. Tarzan of the Apes only needed about twenty minutes to figure out how to read the beautiful Jane Porter's cursive writing. ~ T.K. Naliaka

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

One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case. ~ James Payn

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it. ~ Tennessee Williams

Confidence is half the battle. You have to believe things will go according to plan, until events prove otherwise. ~ Lisa Wingate

There's nothing sexier than confidence, and nothing dumber than over-confidence. Life is all about where you draw the line between the two. ~ Michael Makai

What makes us feel fat, stuck, and lacking in confidence is not just our bodies; it's the situations and relationships in our lives. It's the weight of the situations and relationships we may not know how to navigate or change. It's easier to choose the quick fixes, like drinking, smoking, emotional eating, or avoidance, to help us manage these situations. Yet these untenable solutions just continue to add more physical and emotional weight. If we could all step on a scale that measures emotional weight, I think many of us would be shocked. We have no idea how much our unaddressed emotions can add to any discouraging heaviness and weight in our lives. ~ Rupa Mehta

My favourite all time quote is from Eileen Gray, the subject of my new book The Interview. She believed, 'to create one must first question everything'. A concept that applies to writing as to life ~ Eileen Gray

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. ~ John Updike

Above all, have a good time. If you aren't enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it. ~ Tom Robbins

I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them.... It's work enough to read them sometimes.... As to the writing, it has its own charms. ~ Charles Dickens

Happiness is a hot bath on a Sunday afternoon. ~ A.D. Posey

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked. ~ Dorothea Brande

I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. ~ Don DeLillo

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ... ~ George Orwell

Writing starts with living. ~ L.L. Barkat

I was always shy. Writing was my only outlet. Because I always hid in a room, I spent a lot of time watching people. When I was a small child I could detect hidden body language in others only I could see. People's emotions rub off on me. When I told this to my therapist she said, "Well, you're an empath." I thought, "No way. Like Star Trek?" And she clarified: because I am so socially uncomfortable, I have compassion for others who I recognize are also struggling. People with anxiety are acutely aware. ~ Jenny Lawson

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is. ~ Lorraine Hansberry

Unlike prose writing, the strange process of writing with pictures encourages associations and recollections to accumulate literally in front of your eyes; people, places, and events appear out of nowhere. Doors open into rooms remembered from childhood, faces form into dead relatives, and distant loves appear, almost magically, on the page- all deceptively manageable, visceral, the combinations sometimes even revelatory. ~ Chris Ware

I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it. There is always something wrong with writing. So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words. ~ Denton Welch

When I write to you, I feel your breath; when you read them, I imagine you feel mine. Is it that way with you too? These letters are part of us now, part of our history, a reminder forever that we made it through this time. Thank you for helping me survive this year, but more than that, thank you in advance for all the years to come. ~ Nicholas Sparks

The only time I get sick of making people laugh is when I'm in a non-writing-joke mode, and I just can't seem to come up with anything new that's funny. That's a tough place to be as a comedian. ~ Bill Burr

I've endlessly found myself in rooms of men and had the experience of feeling I wasn't being heard. It's a confidence thing. ~ Sarah Gavron

(Response to King Erik XIV of Sweden's proposal of marriage:)

"[W]hile we perceive ... the zeal and love of your mind towards us is not diminished, yet in part we are grieved that we cannot gratify your Serene Highness with the same kind of affection. And that indeed does not happen because we doubt in any way of your love and honour, but, as often we have testified both in words and writing, that we have never yet conceived a feeling of that kind of affection towards anyone.

We therefore beg your Serene Highness again and again that you be pleased to set a limit to your love, that it advance not beyond the laws of friendship for the present nor disregard them in the future. ...

We certainly think that if God ever direct our hearts to consideration of marriage we shall never accept or choose any absent husband how powerful and wealthy a Prince soever. But that we are not to give you an answer until we have seen your person is so far from the thing itself that we never even considered such a thing. I have always given both to your brother ... and also to your ambassador likewise the same answer with scarcely any variation of the words, that we do not conceive in our heart to take a husband but highly commend this single life, and hope that your Serene Highness will no longer spend time in waiting for us. ~ Elizabeth I