Writing Life Quotes

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I’m a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki

~ Andrew James Pritchard

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.

~ Mary Oliver

As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness.

~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicatea preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

~ Mary Oliver

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain

~ Susan Reynolds

There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.

~ Mindy Kaling

The life of sensation is the life of greed, it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less, time is ample and its passage sweet.

~ Annie Dillard

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

~ Annie Dillard

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Words writers choose are like a glimmering reflection into our souls.

~ Lee Bice-Matheson

Never wait for your muse. Train him/her to show up to work when you do by pushing on. It's a dominant submission thing.

~ Darynda Jones

Writing is a bit like going on a diet, you should either tell everyone or no one.

~ Maeve Binchy

Process is nothing, erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over, I hope birds ate the crumbs, I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

~ Annie Dillard

Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn't always know what it is.

~ Carla H. Krueger

I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.

~ Maxine Hong Kingston

The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.

~ Mylo Carbia

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

~ Annie Dillard

The most lies we will ever tell in our lives will be to ourselves.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Becoming a writer does not mean words will suddenly flow with perfection from your pen. It takes hard work, rejection, and the willingness to lay everything inside you out for the world to see.

~ Jason E. Hodges

Allen Ginsberg instructs: First thought, best thought. Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft

~ Maxine Hong Kingston

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

~ Carla H. Krueger

It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don’t often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I’ve always known existed around me and within me.

~ Casey Curry

It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.

~ Meg Cabot

Writers, by nature, are going to be slightly more delusional than others because we're dreamers, we imagine the unlikely, that's how we create... Rather than hoping my delusion becomes a reality, I'd prefer to keep on being deluded, to dream bigger and to imagine greater. My greater worry would be becoming less delusional .

~ Rowena Wiseman

It probably seems obvious, but as an editor, I love stories. But it’s a little bit more than that. I intensely believe that stories have power. They can spark an idea, or a realization. They can, by just offering another perspective, change a person’s mind. They can make us weep and cry and care. And they can connect us. That’s powerful stuff.

~ Mariah Huehner

When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.

~ Carla H. Krueger

My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.

~ August Wilson

...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.

~ Alaa Al Aswany

I'd be lying if I said killing off characters wasn't therapeutic in some way.

~ Eliza Green

For the writer, madness should seep slowly out of them from the world they endure each day.

~ Jason E. Hodges

Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.

~ Jacqueline Woodson

I lose it when I can't write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

~ Carla H. Krueger

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there's a good chance you were not called.

~ Robin Caldwell

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.

~ Jeffrey A. Carver

I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block? No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.

~ Larry Kahaner