Writing Quotes

The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This is a stamina game, so don't despair if you run down a blind alley and have to start over, or if you get another rejection letter. Every successful writer has gone through that, but they kept writing and didn't quit until they made it happen. ~ Tim Maleeny

I do write my manuscripts by hand, in pencil on legal pads. Then they are typed on a word processor by my typist. ~ Nelson DeMille

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [ ... ] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way. ~ Rasmus Lerdorf

When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child. ~ Joseph Goebbels

Becoming a writer is a lifelong journey. It cannot be learned in a day or even a month or a year. We will never fully learn all there is to know about our craft, and even if we did we wouldn't realize it. We are filled with self-doubt by nature, and many of us will work our entire lives to master the art of the written word without ever recognizing the true talent we possess. Writing is a personal journey of self-discovery and growth, and should be honored as such. If you wonder about my best writing, I would say it came without warning, in moments when I was most vulnerable - with the door shut and my heart split wide open. ~ Shanda Trofe Write From The Heart

It's not so easy writing about nothing. ~ Patti Smith

Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we're dealing with. And to an extent, they're right. They know something about me. ~ Roxane Gay

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in. ~ Sylvia Plath

As a general rule, highly rational writers (like Nabokov) write most comfortably in the morning, and mainly intuitive writers write most comfortably at night. ~ John Gardner

I write because I admire the act of rationalization, of seeking clarity in one's understanding of the complexities of life, and I'm bad at it. I'm slow. Writing, which is an arduous and slow process, proceeds at the same rate as my sloth-like mind. ~ Gregory Maguire

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus. ~ Susan Orlean

It is infinitely harder to ask questions in such a way that the audience is led not to the answers (the province of the demagogue) but to new perceptions. ~ Gore Vidal

Writing is an adventure. ~ Winston Churchill

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably. ~ Jodi Picoult

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing. ~ Teju Cole

Only the broken heart has the ghost of a chance to grieve, to forgive, to long, to transform.
Christina Baldwin, author of Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Practice, 1990. Used with author's permission ~ Judith-Victoria Douglas

I started writing, or rather, thinking, stories as a child, and at that time the reason was very clear. ~ John Sladek

I don't write or think too much about the word "salvation." I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word. ~ Pattiann Rogers

If I had the capabilities of being something other than I am, I would. It's no fun being an artist. You know what it's like, writing, it's torture. ~ John Lennon

Be courageous: be still. ~ Gina Greenlee

I've been writing plays since the seventies and only came to moviemaking when I basically realized that I needed some money to pay the rent. I started to watch films with an eye to figuring out how to write them. ~ John Patrick Shanley

We all start out with the same alphabet. We are all unique. Talent is not the most important thing
discipline and dedication are. Craft can be learned but desire and longing are innate. Despite the demands of school and just being young, try to write SOMETHING every day
a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice. Everything is possible in this world of ours
and so's publication. ~ Robert Cormier

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire. ~ Anna Godbersen

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle
And hoping
It will reach Japan. ~ Alice Munro

What shall I say of the gallantry with which these Marines have fought! Of the slopes of Hill 142; of the Mares Farm; of the Bois de Belleau and the Village of Bouresches stained with their blood, and not only taken away from the Germans in the full tide of their advance against the French, but held by my boys against counter attacks day after day and night after night. I cannot write of their splendid gallantry without tears coming to my eyes. ~ James Harbord

I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person. ~ El-P

Deleuze's findings are confirmed by those of an experienced woman psychiatrist who for many years has made a study of automatic writing. In conversation this lady has informed me that, sooner or later, most automatists produce scripts in which certain metaphysical ideas are set forth. The theme of these scripts is always the same: namely, the the ground of the individual soul is identical with the divine Ground of all being. Returning to their normal state, the automatists read what they have written and often find it in complete disharmony with what they have always believed. ~ Aldous Huxley

A lot of people, for example, live an anxious life. They don't realize they have a super-high level of anxiety. So we're gonna work on really writing down how anxious you feel at the moment you wake up. There's nothing wrong with it; the point is you learn to evaluate yourself and regulate yourself. ~ Cesar Millan

I want to write songs with meaning. I have high standards for my work. ~ Brett Dennen

I can't write from the subconscious actually, because a lot of the time when I co-write with other people, I'm writing for them as opposed to for myself. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to want to give them their voice, since it's most likely going to be on their record, or somebody else's record. And I find for more commerial-style music, people want simplicity, less vagueness, and less space to fill between the lines, so to speak. So I can't be quite as ethereal and mystical. ~ Gary Louris

Rabindranath Tagore writes that the song he wanted to sing has never happened because he spent his days "stringing and unstringing" his instrument. Whenever I read these lines a certain sadness enters my soul. I get so preoccupied with the details and pressure of my schedule, with the hurry and worry of life, that I miss the song of goodness which is waiting to be sung through me. ~ Joyce Rupp

If Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker had teamed up to write epic fantasy, something like Split Heirs might have resulted. ~ John DeChancie

That's the thing that I've always kind of kept in the back of my head in writing about teens, that everything is so important, all the time, every day. Every day of your life, you're changing and making decisions and everything is an emergency to you. ~ Jason Katims

I wanted to write about my mother as she should have been if she had not been messed up by World War I. ~ Doris Lessing

Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die. ~ Pippa DaCosta

I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' ~ Neil Gaiman

Grandma told me Mama was once caught by the Principal for writing in the front of her book, "In Case of Fire, Throw This in First." I have never had so much respect for Mama as the day I heard this. ~ Erma Bombeck

I always say that I'm an artist who works with pictures and words, so I think that the different aspects of my activity, whether it's writing criticism, or doing visual work that incorporates writing, or teaching, or curating, is all of a single cloth, and I don't make any separation in terms of those practices. ~ Barbara Kruger

The kid's emotional growth won't suffer if they don't have the most frightening zombie costume in their class? No? Really?
Can I get that in writing? ~ Taya Kyle

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatically drives a wooden stake through the heart of imagination. If they really understood the mysterious process of creating fiction, they would say, 'You can write about anything you can imagine.' ~ Tom Robbins

I have always loved horror very much. I used to write stories for DC's House of Mystery. It was one of my first jobs writing for comics, and I loved it. ~ Sergio Aragones

My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it. ~ Mary Rodgers

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it. ~ Diane Setterfield

Elizabeth, Lady C, claims to be writing at the limits of language. Would it not be insulting to her if I were diligently to follow after her, explaining what she means but is not smart enough to say? ~ J.M. Coetzee

I love stories, but writing fiction is another craft and I don't feel as if I have it. ~ Joan Larkin

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

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing. ~ Katherine Paterson

What's important with writing is that it comes from a place you absolutely love. I'm writing for film and TV. In America, they call people like me 'multi-hyphenators.' ~ Cush Jumbo

I don't have any writing routine. Sometimes I go to my local coffee shop and I write there for some hours. Apart from that, I am traveling most of the time. I write in airports, trains, hotel rooms ... I can write anywhere. ~ Jo Nesbo

More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief's inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning. ~ Susan Stewart

The music lets me see the story but the story doesn't let me write the words. ~ Elizabeth J. Kolodziej

When I began my career as a writer I thought it would be fun to put my imagination to the page. Now I am finding out that my imagination is able to fill in those pesky holes called details all on its own, and then neglecting to tell me how it did it. ~ Jonathan Bender

Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out. ~ Eli Roth

With two kids it's hard to find down time to write so I often write during their nap time. ~ Tori Spelling

Why write [about my art]? Why not just show the photographs? ~ Constantin Brancusi

Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you write, create?" You don't, I told them. You "don't try". That's very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it. ~ Charles Bukowski

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it. ~ Carla H. Krueger

Sometimes when I'm writing, I wonder if the words have a mind of their own, and if they're really just using me as a puppet to manifest themselves. ~ Travis J. Dahnke

Are you giving the same advice over and over and over again to clients, patients, pupils, interns or friends? If the answer is yes, you should probably write a book about whatever it is that you keep repeating. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

These matters having been arranged, I had a temporary awning erected near the river, and was for three or four days busily employed writing an account of our journey for the Governor's information. ~ Charles Sturt

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul ~ Albert Camus

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from, and I am lucky to be part of it. ~ Kiran Desai

As for developing a writing style'I would say that I tried to copy the pacing of the old movies I loved as a kid. ~ Kola Boof

I can sometimes gaze out of the window, at the sheep, ponies, grazing deer, and numerous woodland folk. It's a wonderful setting in which to write. I live on a dirt road, miles from anywhere, with no neighbors. ~ Raymond Buckland

As journalism dies, I kind of feel like I want some skills besides writing. I'd like to be able to write movies or host TV shows or whatever. Things that I might actually not inherently like quite as much, but are interesting and fun things to do. A good backup plan. ~ Joel Stein

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth. ~ Wole Soyinka

Every credible scientist on earth says your products harm the environment. I recommend paying weasels to write articles casting doubt on the data. Then eat the wrong kind of foods and hope you die before the earth does. ~ Scott Adams

Rock is all about writing your own script; it's all about pioneering. ~ Courtney Love

She held out a small voice recorder. 'By the way, could you describe exactly how you felt at the moment of impact? I'm writing this short story
'
'Put that away, Hazel,' hissed Mam. 'The poor boy is in pain.'
Hazel persisted. 'Would that be a white-hot pain? Or more of a dull throbbing pain? ~ Eoin Colfer

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable. ~ Tennessee Williams

Writing lets other people know just how much fun it is in your head... ~ William Petersen

It's still strange. ~ Arthur K. Flam

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing. ~ Ben Hecht

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road. ~ Richard Price

Writing is not for me. I completely lose my sense of humor when I write. I become extremely pathetic, very sensational. Images give me possibilities that I don't have with words. ~ Marjane Satrapi

No one will argue that writing is an easy profession. Getting someone to pay you for your words isn't easy. But there are strategies you can use to simplify the process and transform what you can produce. ~ Ryan Holiday

Writers don't have lifestyles. They just sit in little rooms and write. ~ Norman Mailer

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. ~ Sharon Olds

The most amazing journey on earth is the journey of oneself. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music. ~ Leo Ornstein

This is a faithless old world. Men and women are hardheaded, pleasure-mad, money crazy. They write up their successes and say, "The power and might of my hand have done these things." God has been ruled out; consequently, the thrill and romance of true living are gone for most people. ~ Lee Roberson

If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart. ~ E.L. Konigsburg

Is it a right thing or a mad thing not to re-connect, to avoid reading or writing because of what those will bring? ~ Bhanu Kapil

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people. ~ William Trevor

I used to be a bumper sticker kind of writer. Now I'm more developed, and my writing often takes up whole bumpers. ~ Jarod Kintz

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't. ~ Dorianne Laux

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. ~ Jose Saramago

[T]welve year old Libby O'Shea coasted on a homemade swing, toes touching a blinding-blue heaven dolloped with clouds. ~ Julie Lessman

Diving in IS testing the water. ~ Gina Greenlee

My inspiration for writing music is like Don McLean did when he did "American Pie" or "Vincent". Lorraine Hansberry with "A Raisin in the Sun". Like Shakespeare when he does his thing, like deep stories, raw human needs.

I'm trying to think of a good analogy. It's like, you've got the Vietnam War, and because you had reporters showing us pictures of the war at home, that's what made the war end, or that shit would have lasted longer. If no one knew what was going on we would have thought they were just dying valiantly in some beautiful way. But because we saw the horror, that's what made us stop the war.

So I thought, that's what I'm going to do as an artist, as a rapper. I'm gonna show the most graphic details of what I see in my community and hopefully they'll stop it quick.

I've seen all of that-- the crack babies, what we had to go through, losing everything, being poor, and getting beat down. All of that. Being the person I am, I said no no no no. I'm changing this. ~ Tupac Shakur

Regardless if a person likes my book I've earned the title: An American Writer. ~ Jonathan Heatt

Some of the worst writing around suffers from inert verbs and the unintended use of the passive voice. Yet the passive voice remains an important arrow in the rhetorical quiver. After all, it exists for a reason. ~ Constance Hale

Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done. ~ Ayn Rand

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so results in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion. ~ Joseph Brodsky

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes. ~ Patton Oswalt

It's a bit cliche, but you can't go wrong by writing what you know. Even if you're a horrible writer, your own knowledge and experience is unrivaled. Nobody knows what you know like you know what you know. The way you see things is pretty unique. ~ Issa Rae

I've always been drawn to writing for young readers. The books that I read growing up remain in my mind very strongly. ~ Meg Wolitzer