Writing Life Quotes

Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.

~ Quinn Anderson

It’s not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.

~ Anthony Marais

May the words come easy, the doubt be weak, and the coffee strong enough to eat through steel. (I don't drink coffee...but I understand most authors do, and they like it with a bit of fight in it.) Now, let us boot up, sit down, and accrue those daily page counts!

~ G. Allen Cook

Always write as if you will never have the blessed chance to write again, so this has to be the best thing you've ever done. Do that, and it will be.

~ Joe Gores

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

Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.

~ Anthony Marais

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

~ Joanna Penn

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

~ Joanna Penn

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

~ Joanna Penn

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

~ Joanna Penn

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

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

I can't do anything else until the words in my head are set free.

~ Sandra J. Jackson

At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.

~ Celeste Ng

Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

~ Natalie Goldberg

But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.

~ Maud Hart Lovelace

The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool.

~ Sallie Tisdale

Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story.

~ Alex Bosworth

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

I have great respect for you - once you are dead, and gone

~ Fakeer Ishavardas

I love pleasure of reading, writing and dancing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence.

~ Wayne Koestenbaum

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.

~ Stewart Stafford

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

~ Chloe Thurlow

Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.

~ Dan Alatorre

I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.

~ Chloe Thurlow

It is infinitely easier to experience an indescribable experience than to describe it.

~ Kevin Focke

Words are living things.

~ Eric Onyango Otieno

Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Life. Is a sentence, therein, weave your story toward freedom.

~ Jt Sanz

Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear.

~ Chloe Thurlow

You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch

~ Susan Boles

Live to write. Write to inspire. Inspire to write.

~ Chi Wen

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