Writing Life Quotes

Success does not bring happiness. Success brings success.

~ Joanie Holzer Schirm

Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It’s an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.

~ Jason E. Hodges

Writing is a blurred mirror. Sometimes we work harder to see how we are reflected, but often we avert our gaze from the shadowy image.

~ Kristen Twardowski

Everything from the humble woodlouse to specks of dust moving through a ray of sunlight. Each tells a story.

~ Fennel Hudson

Writing Tip:Don't let the writing rules bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.

~ Linda Westphal

An author is like an incompetent bricklayer - doesn't use mortar and keeps rearranging the bricks until someone tells him to stop.

~ Chris Everheart

A person whom works exclusively for money places a price tag on his or her soul. A person whom labors to attain fame seeks a false form of adulation. The writer ignores the lure of a glamorous life by seeking to penetrate the darkness of their own being and meditate the larger issues that frame existence. A seeker knowingly follows a path that is barren, bleak, desolate, and unproductive in terms of attaining recognition and exulted social and financial status.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The moment I realize I just stayed up until five in the morning writing is that moment I know I am meant to be a writer.

~ Anastasia Bolinder

A writer’s tools are desperation, humiliation, loneliness, love, affection, heartache, happiness, glee, defeat, victory, setbacks, and a desire for personal redemption. People with the experience to know of such things relate that in order to write one must suffer an alleyway of anguish, and experience an array of physical and emotional pain. More than anything else, emotional growth, and writing are each reflective of the immeasurable gain accomplished through studious reflection.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

As a writer, my mission is to represent the perceptible world in such a way that readers can see the extraordinary that lives all around them. I want to converse on the page. I want to squash the humdrum, the mendacity that arrives due to too many overworked routines and overfed expectations. I want to entertain and awaken. I want to imagine and observe. I want to spin my fiction from an honest, curious place.

~ Jen Knox

What’s it like being a writer? Mostly it’s like being a child surrounded by adults. My friends have grown-up careers. They balance spreadsheets, analyze data, negotiate deals. They build things, heal patients, teach children. Meanwhile, I’m over here saying “Let’s pretend.

~ Jennifer Froelich

There is always, always, always something to write about.

~ Rob Bignell

Writing heals my heart like no pill ever could.

~ Rob Bignell

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

~ Rob Bignell

Every writer must acknowledge and be able to handle the unalterable fact that he has, in effect, given himself a life sentence in solitary confinement.

~ Peter Straub

...you are a writer the moment you start writing, not when you've sold your first book.

~ Rob Bignell

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

~ George Orwell

Nothing makes you feel smaller than New York City...

~ Christy Hall

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

~ Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.

~ Patti Digh

I write because I have to, because I wouldn't know what to do with my hands if I didn't.

~ Angeline Trevena

I've never yet run out of ideas what to write about... only out of time to write it in.

~ Rayne Hall

Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to write...so I do.

~ Cassandra Giovanni

The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.

~ Marcus Speh

Oh, readers. If only you knew what we've gone through for you.

~ Harry Olsen

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

The biggest thing for aspiring writers I would say is that writing is hard work. You can’t sustain the fantasy that it should somehow be otherwise for you because you are more special or more committed than other aspiring writers. You aren’t sitting down to be entertained by the gods or to entertain yourself. At times it can be a thrill and it feels more like play, but we are easily deceived by whatever pleasures or rewards writing can offer. Exhilarating work is still work. Is it work, or is it play? And the answer is “yes.” Does it sometimes feel like it comes easily or naturally? Yes. But did it really come easily? No. Writing doesn’t offer the rhythmic endorphin hit you get scrolling down the screen clicking on memes. Are you up for the work it is going to take to become successful as a writer? It is going to be harder than you think. You are submitting to forces and to a process that you can’t fully control. There is maybe a tiny bit more control if you self-publish, and there is no shame in doing that, but even that is going to introduce hard work. Probably harder than you think. If my next novel can’t find a home, I’m not above self-publishing it in some capacity and then moving on to the next project.

~ Brian K. Friesen

Not everyone gets to do what they love, be good at it, and get paid for it. If you do, you're lucky.

~ Britt Holewinski

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her scribbling suit consisted of a black woollen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally, to ask, with interest, Does genius burn, Jo? They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did any one dare address Jo.

~ Louisa May Alcott

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

~ Geraldine Solon

I write because, as wonderful as life is - and it is truly wonderful - it isn't enough. It does not, for example, contain dragons. I find this unsatisfactory. So I read. And I write.

~ Laini Taylor

Real-life duties eat valuable writing time.

~ Rayne Hall

Receiving very little or no feedback from my writing I really don't know if people like it or if they are actually reading any of my work for that matter. Still I will continue to write regardless. I suppose it is similar to people who talk just to hear their own voice. I write simply to see my own thoughts in print.

~ Andrew James Pritchard

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

~ Pat Conroy

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my real life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and the house and I resume old conversations.

~ May Sarton

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

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Be Visionary ...

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

~ Annie Cohen-Solal

When a person sets out to learn from others and not to teach others he becomes a true writer.

~ Carla H. Krueger

There are authors who write to communicate, there are authors who write to impress themselves.

~ Mark S. Hertzog