Inspirational Quotes

My books are mine, and yet they are alien to me--as a child belongs to a parent and yet has a life of its own. I can guide and hope and nudge my characters this and that way, but in the end, they become what they become. I don't always like what they become myself, but like a parent, there are times when I just don't know what to do about it. Other times when I'm so proud of them I could bust.

~ Laura Kinsale

Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.

~ Ann Patchett

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

~ Janet Fitch

When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.

~ Hélène Cixous

I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me... I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life... I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I'll ever have.

~ Natalie Goldberg

Writing is the emotional morphine.

~ Mariam Maarouf

As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.

~ Rita Webb

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

~ Paul Valéry

But then why do we write if not to tackle the fears that others look to us to conquer?

~ J.f. Penn

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

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

~ Tom Robbins

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

~ Janet Frame

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

~ Laura Goode

A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.

~ Cheryl B. Klein

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.

~ Leon Uris

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

~ Eudora Welty

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

~ A.d. Posey

I write to be a part of something - a world made up of words and ideas, which are sometimes painfully criticized, gratefully loved and can never be destroyed.

~ Ashley Sanders

If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?

~ Lauren B. Davis

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

~ James Jones

I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.

~ Rukhsana Khan

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

~ Tom Robbins

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

~ Chinua Achebe.

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

~ Meagan Spooner

Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!

~ Joanne Mcclean

You can only write what you know if you've lived, otherwise, you'll just be writing words.

~ Joseph Hunt

I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

~ Pat Pattison

Listen to your inner self, it knows you best.

~ C. Elizabeth

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

~ Tennessee Williams

Rejection isn't a sign of failure. Rejection is a reminder that there's always room for improvement.

~ Ana Hart

I don't write for a living. I live to write.

~ Marwa Ayad

Remember to have a little faith. When you die, I believe, God isn't going to ask you what you published. God's going to ask you what you wrote.

~ T.m. Mcnally

Imagine in vibrant, wonderful detail your heart’s desire—a reality only you can envision, an adventure only you can direct.Then cradle your creation. Caress it. Mold it. Coddle it until it comes to life.And when your precious treasure grows so grand as to steal your breath away, set it free for all the world to experience. For that is how you live your dreams.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

~ Ray Bradbury

First and foremost, I am me. I'm real. I don't write to impress. I write to express.

~ Raebeth Mcgee-Buda

If you don't think too good, don't think too much.

~ Ted Williams

That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

~ Kelly Barnhill

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

~ David Morrell

And so many things get lost. Not just a set of keys or a photograph of your father with his first truck, but the door those keys once opened, the childhood house you long ago walked into, the father who used to carry you on his shoulders high above the crowds at the summer fair, his body now ashes and shards of bone. You hold these things in place on a page, you walk through that door, touch his face and smell the cigarette smoke on his breath and in his shirt, you make things breathe again in words. You feel the lightness of a ghostly touch across your skin. In that small house on the corner, the porch light suddenly comes on.

~ Lorna Crozier

Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she'd written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time.

~ Lisa Scottoline