Writing Life Quotes

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!

~ Samuel Colbran

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

~ Eudora Welty

Even a baby can write a poem. It doesn't guarantee the sale.

~ Bhavik Sarkhedi

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

~ Cynthis Ozick

Writing, unfortunately, takes last priority for my time but it's the first priority in my heart I wish I had all the time for. Such is reality.

~ Veronica Purcell

All it takes is one word, one action, one voice. Believe in yourself, and you can accomplish anything!

~ Samuel Colbran

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

~ Catherine Carrigan

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

~ Grace Paley

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

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.

~ R.m. Donaldson

Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice. -Cheryl L. Ilov, Forever Fit and Flexible: Feeling Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond.

~ Cheryl L. Ilov

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

~ James Baldwin

What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.

~ Charles Johnson

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.

~ Troye Sivan

Everyone, except a writer, thinks writing is easy. Writing is tough. Being a disciplined writer is tougher.

~ Tarang Sinha

Frankly, if there ever was a time when I was really happy, it wasn't during those first intoxicating moments of my success, but long before that, when I hadn't yet read or shown my manuscript to anyone -- during those long nights of ecstatic hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I had grown attached to my vision, to the characters I had created myself, as though they were my own offspring, as though they really existed -- and I loved, rejoiced and grieved over them, at times even shedding quite genuine tears over my guileless hero.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

For the curious, I write

~ Veronica Purcell

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

~ Elena Ferrante

In the best interest of profession, a writer should sometimes refrain from writing.

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

Reading/writing is a chance to live a different life in a different world.

~ Tarang Sinha

The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.

~ Alina Stefanescu

When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

~ Elena Ferrante

Writing helps maintain my sanity or else I would lose my mind.

~ M.j. Masucci

If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.

~ Neil Gaiman

Life is about showing up, so is writing. That’s why I sit at my desk every day and dance my fingers across the keyboard

~ Laurie Buchanan

Writers are the wind that sail words across the page.

~ Laurie Buchanan

Yes, writing is that easy. Yes, writing is that hard. But if you want to do it you can. Only you can stop you.

~ R.m. Donaldson

Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story.

~ R.m. Donaldson

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

~ May Sarton

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.

~ Julia Cameron

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

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

~ May Sarton

All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.

~ Michael Stutz

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

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

~ Allison K. Williams

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster