Writing Life Quotes

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.

~ Anne Rice

I’m much more than a writer – I’m someone who puts different words together in an interesting way.

~ Carla H. Krueger

When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, You can do this. You've got what it takes. The other sounds like my mother-in-law.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death, the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying—and often drives us mad. So if you're not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.

~ Samuel R. Delany

I’m an observer. I am fascinated by people and how their minds work (and, of course, my own). Why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do – and that interest drives my writing. I was a physicist before fiction claimed my soul, so I’m an experimenter. I’m open to different ways of thinking. I like exaggerating, making things up. I’m a very open, honest person in life and that’s the way it should be, but when it comes to fiction, I want to pour a few sharp objects into the comfort zone. Our fears are powerful, yet we’ve all got a desire to laugh and be entertained. I could have followed the same path I do now as a scientist, examining how the brain works. Ironically I get much more freedom to experiment as a writer. That’s why I love it.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

~ Rob Bignell

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

~ Philip Roth

Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Words writers choose are a glimmering reflection into our souls.

~ Lee Bice-Matheson-Matheson

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living.

~ Chloe Thurlow

A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.

~ Robert Benson

Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.

~ Ralph Keyes

Writing is not a numbers game. You should focus more on reaching the hearts of readers and building fans more than publishing a plethora of books that no one may care about.

~ Selena Haskins

I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past.

~ Annie Rogers

There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.

~ Rob Bignell

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.

~ Rob Bignell

Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It elicits empathy, promotes learning, creates an intellect you simply cannot get from any other medium. For me, it is air.

~ Darynda Jones

A daily written thankful gratitude is a heavenly blessing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

~ Stephen King

Write to evolve and you'll evolve to write.

~ Katina Ferguson

Forget how long the path to finishing your story. Address only what you have to write today.

~ Martha Alderson

He said: I don't like to read. And I said, honey, you haven't found the right girl.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.

~ Martha Reed

Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.

~ Jonathan Heatt

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

~ Roman Payne

Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.

~ Alane Adams

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

~ Dani Shapiro

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

~ Glen Hirshberg

Live first, write second.

~ Miranda Paul

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.

~ Elizabeth Berg

My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me “a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

~ Nenia Campbell

Beware of being only a writer.

~ Miranda Paul

In her spare time she scribbled her thoughts, wishes and dreams, life and times. It kept her sane despite her loneliness.

~ Aporva Kala

Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.

~ Alane Adams

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

~ Chloe Thurlow

One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.

~ Ella J. Fraser

Books are like horcruxes--without all the evil--because a piece of the author goes into each one.

~ Ella J. Fraser