Writers On Writing Quotes

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer or an author must always be the no.1 fan of his/her book.

~ Aditi Dufare

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

~ Avijeet Das

But what is life without a passion?

~ Avijeet Das

Things that only a writer would understand—you’re writing a character—you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

~ Lisa Marbly-Warir

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

~ Avijeet Das

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!

~ Avijeet Das

Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.

~ Avijeet Das

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing this trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

~ Duncan B. Barlow

If you don’t write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.

~ Sahara Sanders

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents’ house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer.

~ Sahara Sanders

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

~ Charles Bukowski

Write only if you wish to read it again and again...

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let m crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and i hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

~ Richard Wright

A writer who hasn't written anything worth-while is a most doubtful person.

~ Richard Wright

The closest to my heart is not just one book - it’s the whole series of novels, Indigo Diaries. The first volume, “Gods’ Food,” is already available in English.

~ Sahara Sanders

Emily mostly perceived her habit to write down notes as being one of the ways she could use to preserve moments of life.

~ Sahara Sanders

The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.

~ Sahara Sanders

Every writer, of course, has very specific ideas about editors. But writers seldom get the last word on anything.

~ Terry Mcdonell

Having authored numerous and pretty versatile write-ups, I can’t say that anything other than my soul, heart and life experience can be called a prominent part of every book I ever wrote

~ Sahara Sanders

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

~ Flannery O'connor

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

~ Flannery O'connor

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

~ Paul Haggis

It makes a great difference to the look of a novel whether its author believes that the world came late into being and continues to come by a creative act of God, or whether he believes that the world and ourselves are the product of a cosmic accident. It makes a great difference to his novel whether he believes that we are created in God's image, or whether he believes we create God in our own. It makes a great difference whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.

~ Flannery O'connor

For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected.

~ Flannery O'connor

A good writer should be able to communicate to the reader, 'I know your life. I know what you have truly experienced. It’s not right or wrong. It’s survival. It’s making mistakes, and trying to redeem yourself. It’s imperfections, and trying to make yourself better. It’s outrages, and crimes, and insults, which often are not righted, which you have to fix yourself, in your own mind, in your own heart, so that you are not poisoned'.

~ Sergio Troncoso

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Writing is hard…It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it’s no longer a hobby, it’s no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

~ Karina Halle

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

~ Mary Lawrence

A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

~ Stephen King

A voice is a product of the writer’s own Pandora Box of insight, insecurities, bravado, modesty, humility, affection, understanding, and confidence. In short, a voice reflects the writers’ sangfroid. The tenor of the writer’s voice also reflects their insecurities, self-doubt, egotism, testiness, and the ability to identify with their mental and physical infirmities. The inflection that distinguishes a writer’s pitch from other wordsmiths’ tone reflects their collective lifetime of mundane, tranquil, disturbing, and passionate experiences.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I write to remind me of the experiences, fictional or non-fictional, that flows a bit of selfless truths. For the me in the ‘I’, or the me through your eyeballs, it is a serum to separate the lumpiness in my heart.

~ James Emlund

I have come to learn, that when people of money and power organize to set upon to break a person they seek to silence, and the person seems but a shadow of what they were, under the endless barrage, in the end when laid to rest, the dignity, compassion and presence of the person somehow endures, and their words awaken to speak clearer than before.As if torches ignite, when their flame is gone,and the light of their truth,Is brilliantly lit and once more born.

~ Tom Althouse

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

~ Nora Ephron

Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It’s amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

~ Pierce Brown

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

~ Gina Mcknight

Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.

~ E. L. Tenenbaum

I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates