Writing Mindset Quotes

What I found was an ability to enjoy writing again, because I stopped making it about wanting to be the best, or wanting to be better than some past version of myself, or better than other people I admire a lot who write YA fiction.

Instead of seeing it as a pyramid, or something that you're trying to get to the top of; I started seeing it as a huge ball that I'm trying to, like, contribute one layer of paint to. Lots of other people are contributing layers of paint, and through that the ball gets more beautiful and more interesting, and also bigger.

And instead of me needing to be at the top of my game somehow, what I can really do I think in the end, is contribute in a small way to a very big conversation that's very old. And that's what art is for me. ~ John Green

Language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset ... ~ John Geddes

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful - the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.

Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Make no mistake, no one has ever become great by mistake. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In my heart, I love books, I love writing. I love the lines of letters on a page. ~ Jaclyn Dolamore

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked. ~ Don Roff

As a director who does not like to write, I am always looking for scripts that I can contribute to through directing. I don't want to do the same thing that the writer is doing; I want to add an angle or highlight a theme. ~ Jen McGowan

Everything is in a script for a reason, and only by being part of a writing team (or writing it yourself), do you really understand the intention of every beat. ~ Peter Jackson

I think 'G.I. Joe' is a perfect example of how I'm the world's worst businessman. If I were smart, I'd be writing 'World War Z Part 12', but I have to go where the muse leads, and I've always been a huge 'G.I. Joe' fan. I always wanted to know more about these characters, these little plastic figures I played with as a kid. ~ Max Brooks

There is a musical rhythm to great writing, especially if it's performed correctly. ~ Richard LaGravenese

Don't take to heart, any negative criticism. Focus on positive thoughts ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing. ~ Willa Cather

I don't really do anything that isn't about writing, and I don't really know who I am if I'm not thinking about writing. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

If a writer is daydreaming, leave them be. They could be plotting their next great story. ~ Graeme Roberts

I go through cycles with my writing. I have cycles where I'm up all night and lose track of time, and then I go for months without a thing to write about. My song 'So Good, So Right' came to me while I was washing dishes after a dinner party. ~ Brenda Russell

I like to listen to music that fits with what I'm writing. For each book, I've assembled a playlist, so readers can get a sense of what I was listening to while I was writing. ~ Cassandra Clare

I don't exist
metal pressed to pages
spilling blood, ink
in vein each thought rages

Sunlight shooting
through a forest of pines
black top winding
and yellow dotted lines

I am not here
only a deep aching,
a lightning flash
and a tree trunk breaking

Sheets once alive
covered in a deep red
mark the present
but I am not yet dead

Nothing is here
only the rain and mist
fresh air and soil
I do not need to exist. ~ Abby Musgrove

Cruising the Internet doesn't count as writing. Neither does answering e-mail. Before you check Twitter & FB and do other similar tasks that get in the way of writing, write first. (I really need to take my own advice here!) ~ Terry McMillan

My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, from teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me. ~ Alexander Chee

I identified in a very deep way with the individuals I was writing about because the theme that runs through this story is of extraordinary hardship and the will to overcome it. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing. ~ Seth MacFarlane

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. ~ Sylvia Plath

With my writing, I can still play inside an enchanted castle or live inside an old fort. I can run from ghosts or ride dolphins any day of the week. ~ Mary Pope Osborne

42. Your process of thinking should change as you get older. If it doesn't, then you haven't grown up. If you still have the same mindset and perception of life that you had 10 plus years ago, then you are still a child. And this is the problem with many black communities today; we are grown up children, still looking, talking, and acting like we did when we were kids. Back in the day, you could tell a man from a boy or a woman from a girl by the way he/she dressed and talked. But today, you have to see someone drivers license in order to tell their age. This is a sign that we as a people are still stuck in our youth. And until our way of thinking matures, our circumstances will remain the same. ~ Maurice W. Lindsay

Now write this: 'The greatest rapture of my life was afforded me on a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush,' and sign it 'James Bond, 007.' ~ Barbara Carrera

Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing. ~ Siri Hustvedt

To disguise nothing, to conceal nothing, to write about those things that are closest to our pain, our happiness; to write about our sexual clumsiness, the agonies of Tantalus, the depth of our discouragement-what we glimpse in our dreams-our despair. To write about the foolish agonies of anxiety, the refreshment of our strength when these are ended; to write about our painful search for self, jeopardized by a stranger in the post office, a half-seen face in a train window, to write about the continents and populations of our dreams, about love and death, good and evil, the end of the world. ~ John Cheever

In all my paintings, the animal is at the centre. Surrounding it are the things that define the animal. This is how beauty is characterized. You need to characterize beauty by association.
I have learned to worship beauty. Not ordinary beauty but that in its stormiest nature. ~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

I have always been interested in the way that elements of stories twine and combine. At school I had an art teacher, a great influence on me, who disliked man-made objects unless they were old and showed the effects of time and wear; she loved all natural things. I share this attitude and it plays a large part in my writing. I'm fascinated by the ambiguity of man's relationship to the huge, mysterious universe around him; how, on the one hand, we make ourselves little boxes and think to exist safely and snugly in them; on the other, we extend our knowledge further and further into the limitless void; and yet from time to time these opposites collide and produce astonishing results. ~ Joan Aiken

She was a passionate reader, and she thought that reading was one of the noblest efforts of all; in contrast, she found writing to be a great waste of time - a childish self-indulgence, even messier than finger painting - but she admired reading, which she believed was an unselfish activity that provided information and inspiration. She must have thought it a pity that some poor fools had to waste their lives writing in order for us to have sufficient reading material. (page 236) ~ John Irving

I stopped dying the moment I started writing ~ Arnon Grunberg

Your mental attitude and its direction are critical factors in how you experience and navigate life. ~ Claudia Velandia

Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living? ~ Anna Comnena

I follow where the story goes. Always. Every time. Sometimes it goes places where I'm not comfortable ... it's at those times that I just listen to my characters, hold on with both hands, and trust that my readers won't lynch me later. ~ Dennis Sharpe

The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding. ~ David Crystal

Writing screenplays is not my business. I've written half a dozen, and maybe half of those were made. But it was never a satisfying experience. It was just work. You're an employee. You would be told what to do. Studio execs would cross out my dialogue and put in their dialogue. ~ Elmore Leonard

What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich