Writing Life Quotes

It's like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back in again and the moment I'm back in, it just keeps on going and going again...all of this, so I can find things out and then I write about the things I find out so you can find them out from me. All the bruises, all the wounds, all the bumps on the head, all the scars, just so I can take that and I can write all these things, and sometimes I say God, I don't want to be in this roller coaster anymore. But when I think about it, if I'm not right here, then where the hell would I be? On the sidewalk? I wasn't born to stand on the sidewalk, I was born to fly around crazy in the sky!

~ C. Joybell C.

Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writersmystics, painters, troubadoursfor they teach us to see the world through different eyes.

~ Jacob Nordby

If everyone could be a successful and rich author, there would be no point in working so hard. Where is the fun in that?

~ L.a. Jones

I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself When did they live? I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations.

~ C. Joybell C.

To wake up every day with a whisper of a dream and then put pen to paper to make it a reality

~ Samuel Colbran

Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The great writers have to fight for their words. They have to choose to write, choose words over distractions, and their characters over their friends. Great writers can be lonely, exhausted souls. But through our characters, we live.

~ Alessandra Torre

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy.

~ Mary Karr

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

~ Thomas Mcguane

Don't ever rely on one job, business contact, etc for your main source of income. Receive multiple sources of income for success.

~ Chris Mentillo

Have you noticed how prejudice still exists today. For instance, now they challenge famous people for their past achievements: People like Christopher Columbus and now even Vince lombardi. Nothing surprises me. I never grew-up with prejudices against anyone. I don't care what color you are or where you came from. This sort of stuff to me never made sense. You see I grew up in a educated family. Education teaches you not to be so ignorant.

~ Chris Mentillo

Start having more confidence in yourself, and others will do the same.

~ Chris Mentillo

Stop now and decide to never worry again about what others think about you.

~ Chris Mentillo

Some of my greatest successes in business are simply the result of taking huge, calculated risks.

~ Chris Mentillo

You can have practically anything you want in this world, if you have great credit.

~ Chris Mentillo

Writing isn't only about a completed piece of work.It’s about the writer you’re becoming while creating.

~ T.n. Suarez

A dream is like a first draft. No one will ever see it but you.

~ T.n. Suarez

SUCCESS in WRITING occurs when your DREAMS are BIGGER than your EXCUSES.

~ T.n. Suarez

Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.And that’s not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you’re not careful…But I’ve spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope…) at the writing, so I’m not giving it/them up!

~ Ariel Gordon

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

~ Stephen King

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

~ Anne Lamott

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

~ Robert Hass

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.

~ Roald Dahl

Too many irons, not enough fire.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

~ Socrates

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

~ Donald Harington

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

~ Michael Chabon

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.

~ Julia Cameron

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

~ Neil Gaiman

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

~ Sandra Brown

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

~ David Gerrold

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

~ Aberjhani

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

~ Annie Dillard

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

~ Ray Bradbury

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Use all this life to make yourself a great writer, thoughtful and kind, slowly, surely over the years.

~ T.k. Naliaka

I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.

~ Stephen J. Cannell

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

~ Anthony Trollope

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

~ Annie Dillard

Collaborating on a film script involves two people sitting in a room separated by the silence of two minds working together.

~ Darlene Craviotto

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

~ Lettie Prell