Writing Legacy Quotes

Words often outlive the people who create them. ~ Amy Neftzger

You can't have a conversation with your descendants when you are dead, but they can when they are alive; write a book! ~ Lamine Pearlheart

My writing legacy would be my true depiction of life; exploring the entire colorful spectrum of people, both good and bad, capturing it in words and exposing it to all cultures in a respectful manner - In a way that would stand the test of time. ~ Diane Martin

As a youngster, I never dreamed there could be a career actually earning a living writing music. ~ John Williams

A writer who rejects happiness is like an astronomer who rejects the stars. ~ Marty Rubin

I Need a Good Book

I need a good story.
I need a good book.
The kind that explodes
Off the shelf.
I need some good writing,
Alive and exciting,
To contemplate all by myself.

I need a good novel,
I need a good read.
I probably need
Two or three.
I need a good tale
Of love and betrayal
Or perhaps an adventure at sea.

I need a good saga.
I need a good yarn.
A momentous and mightily
Or slight one.
But with thousands and thousands
And thousands of books,
I need someone to tell me
The right one.

-John Lithgow ~ John Lithgow

We are truly defined by what we pass on to the next generation. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen. ~ Joe Meno

In the end, I believe these pages and the Book of Records return to the persistence of this desire: to know the times in which we are alive. To keep the record that must be kept and also, finally, to let it go. ~ Madeleine Thien

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.
There is my desert. ~ Edmond Jabes

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously. ~ Richard P. Denney

Writing is a Passion, Art is my Dreams, Crafting is something I Enjoy.

The day one stops learning is the day one stops living. ~ Carol Hopkins

An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to the sound of one's own prose. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Be fearless. Write what you want. Write how you want. Create art. ~ Beth Revis

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that. ~ K.A. Applegate

I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here. ~ Sloane Crosley

My mind is like a little house,
My peers break into.
They rearrange my furniture,
And the cabinets rifle through.
They throw things out;
They put things in,
And erase the writing on the wall,
And by the time that they walk out,
It's not my mind at all. ~ Margo T. Rose

Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time. ~ Debasish Mridha

The writer's only real task: to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art ~ James Baldwin

Acting is more fun than writing. Writing is harder, more like having a term paper. ~ Owen Wilson

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics. ~ Oriana Fallaci

We - all of us - want to feel special. We want to feel the glory that shines on us when we reach beyond our boundaries to grab at something greater, to live a heroic life, if only for a day or a week or a moment.
This simple yearning is in us all, hardly recognizable, often only the merest hint that there is something more to us.
This is why we seek out new places ... we want to remember a somewhere that gave us the space to expand ourselves, to become a little more of who we truly are. ~ J.E. Leigh

I believe almost every author have gone through the terribly uncomfortable period between the time of shedding the seeds of a story and waiting to see it flourish as a published book, spending hours watering and fertilizing it. This is a dreadful period, frustrating and depressing. ~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject. ~ Philip Gerard

For all of my class projects, I somehow turned it into a commercial parody or put on plays. My whole thing was seeing things from a big picture, from beginning to middle to end: making a costume, doing voices, writing a script, making it all happen. ~ Noel Wells

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil. ~ Richard Bach

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new. ~ Marie Howe

The calls of birds and the traces left by wolves to mark off their territories are no less forms of language than the sings of humans. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language. It is the crystallisation of language in writing. ~ John N. Gray

This is mainly because I spend a lot of time writing and so don't have much time to read; I hate to waste that time reading what may turn out to be junk food for the mind, when there's so much real writing to be read. ~ John Sladek

Apart from values and ethics which I have tried to live by, the legacy I would like to leave behind is a very simple one - that I have always stood up for what I consider to be the right thing, and I have tried to be as fair and equitable as I could be. ~ Ratan Tata

Don't hold back in your writing. Take risks. Go ahead and tackle that crazy idea that you think will never fly, because that may be the one that makes you stand out from the crowd. Keep pushing the envelope. ~ Carrie Vaughn

You see, writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues - and an excuse for handling those issues badly. ~ David Sax

I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing. ~ Tony Kushner

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Mrs. Cheerson, our old teacher? She gave us an essay to write over the holiday. It was on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I read and it was good, and I think it's stupid to spoil a good book by writing an essay on it. So I didn't do it. ~ Jaclyn Moriarty

You're unhappy and you feel like a failure. PERFECT! Use that sad/angry/disappointed energy. Channel it into what you know, deep down in your heart, you love.

Spend the next six months in a state of total obsession. Get up two hours earlier than usual and write before you go to work. Come home and exercise (not optional, sorry), then write for another hour. Read or watch the kind of comedy you love before bed. Don't waste all your time socializing. Do a little socializing on weekends, but focus. Focus! Save your money. Research part-time work you could do for your company; use your slackness as a way to sell a new position where your boss would get your best from you every hour that you're there. Pitch it as a win-win. Or pitch working from home half the time to cure your blahs and jack up your productivity. Then overproduce at work, but fit all of your work into a part-time schedule, and fill your prime working hours with writing/comedy. Almost any capable human with a not-that-taxing job can pull this off if they put their mind to it. If you're a manager, investigate other roles or sell your boss on the fact that you're managing via e-mail most of the time anyway. ~ Heather Havrilesky

Multitask? What do I look like, a fucking secretary?" My temper flared before I could bite it back. Erica wasn't the only one with a big mouth. I was constantly in danger of writing checks my ass couldn't cash, the bearer of a lifelong disease of potty mouth that no amount of soap in this world could properly cleanse. ~ J.A. Saare

I was so flat I used to put Xs on my chest and write: "You are here". I wore angora sweaters just so the guys would have something to pet. ~ Joan Rivers

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something. ~ Geoff Dyer

This is just the present chapter of my life. How can I give up when God isn't finished writing my story yet? ~ Deb Brammer

Writers are fortunate in that they are able to treat their neurosis every day by writing and as soon as the writer is blocked - this is catastrophic because the writer will start to go to pieces. ~ Edmund Bergler

Little books are the things to write at my age, I've decided. Avoid the big ones, go for the little ones. ~ Clive James

See, I'm not the type of writer that has 400 songs in a suitcase someplace on the shelf. I'm sort of a rise-to-the-occasion-type of writer, so when I know I'm going to record, I get in the mood to write. ~ Luther Vandross

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

Don't wait until you're 'in the mood.' Get into the mood by writing. ~ Margaret Atwood

As long you are still living, you can achieve far more than you could ever imagined ~ Benjamin Suulola

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE. ~ Guy Kawasaki

Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.

Tarantino - you can criticize everything that Quentin does - but nobody writes Tarantino stuff like Tarantino. He is the best Tarantino writer there is, and that was actually the thing that people responded to - they're going 'this is an individual writing with his own point of view'.

There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there's nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can. ~ Neil Gaiman

A novel is something that stands at the end of a lengthy process called writing. It is not a preexisting Platonic form embedded within the writer... I do not have a Boston marathon inside me waiting to get out. The marathon is a peak experience I am rightly entitled to only as the culmination of years of regular training and love of running. ~ Victoria Nelson

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. ~ Henry Adams