Writers On Writing Quotes

I've never been high. Writing is my drug of choice. You don't ever have to come down from that kind of high, I tell ya. And, best part is, it's free.

~ Christy Hall

My stories are my children. Some are sweet infants that I coddle and care for. Others are old enough now, they need to damn well get a job!

~ Christy Hall

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

~ Don Roff

Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.

~ Fabrizio De André

I have found that a writer is formed not so much by their experiences but by the way in which they view and capture those experiences.

~ Sophia Rose

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.

~ Adam Steven Page

Where the writing takes place doesn’t matter to a publisher, but it matters a great deal to the author.

~ Fennel Hudson

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

~ Fennel Hudson

I never understood, what a starving artist was until I became one.

~ Mary Sage Nguyen

Letters orchestrated into a song of words create the symphony of a novel.

~ Leslie Austin

...for every type of idea someone can have - no matter how weird or strange or gross or out there or disturbing - there is at least one person out there who enjoys that kind of idea, and the best part is seeing a book work its way to that person.

~ Stylo Fantome

I've never heard a writer feel that way about a device with a screen. Oh sure, they're functional, practical. We would be lost without them. But just as we need to feel our feet on the earth, smell and taste the world around us, the pen scratching against the page, sensory and slow, is the difference between looking at a high-definition picture of a flower and holding that very same flower in your palm, feeling the brush of its petals, the color of its stamen rubbing off on your fingers.

~ Dani Shapiro

The gift of writing, natural flow of thoughts from the deepest heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

So I went back in time and told her how I liked the smell of soil after the rain. It has a special place in my heart. It reminds me of my childhood days. Days spent in happiness and tranquility.

~ Avijeet Das

I have never found a painter more beautiful than his paintings nor a writer who was more expressive than his works. While one got his hands dirty, other made the paper dirty to create masterpieces!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modern ink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn. But when you push an inkstick along an inkstone, you take the first step to cleansing your mind and your heart. You push and you ask yourself, What are my intentions? What is my heart that matches my mind?

~ Amy Tan

In the act of creation, as in all the arts, the soul should be felt in the face and the fingers and the tongue, even in the cavities.

~ Chris Campanioni

Every writer or wanna-be writer has ideas for books. The problem isn't finding an idea, it's choosing one

~ Jo Linsdell

Never chase people in your life. No one is worthier than you to be chased.

~ Avijeet Das

I should be writing ...

~ Mur Lafferty

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.

~ Kayla Rae Whitaker

When I consider writing I sometimes wonder why doesn't everybody do it, other times I wonder why does anybody do it.

~ Tonny K. Brown

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

~ Roman Payne

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

~ Roman Payne

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange “sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can’t wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human’s hand.

~ Sahara Sanders

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children—you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it.

~ Sahara Sanders

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.

~ Chris Campanioni

Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person’s level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Why the tag of ‘aspiring’ writer be the wishful cliché? It’s like a bumper sticker. Say it! I am a Writer. Period. We may all have a target and gradation toward successes, a personal illusion/perception. The quality or perseverance in one’s craft is your act. Flaws? Sure. Yet, you are a Writer, not a wannabe. Let go of the tags. Just write!

~ Jt Sanz

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

~ Carla H. Krueger