Writing Life Quotes

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

~ Yiyun Li

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

~ Angeline Trevena

If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.

~ Barbara Baig

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

~ Christy Hall

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

~ Chila Woychik

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

~ Chila Woychik

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

~ Chila Woychik

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

~ Chila Woychik

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.

~ Chila Woychik

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

~ Chila Woychik

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

~ Chila Woychik

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

~ Chila Woychik

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

~ Chila Woychik

You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.

~ Christy Hall

Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

~ Christy Hall

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

~ Chila Woychik

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

~ Chila Woychik

New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.

~ Christy Hall

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

~ Chila Woychik

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.

~ Martin Amis

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

~ Stendhal

To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.

~ Patricia Hampl

Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.

~ Barbara Abercrombie

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. In my mind, they were a whole lot better.Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

~ David Morrell

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

~ Isabel Huggan

A 15-minute gap in your day is plenty of time to write and read, but not if you check your email first.

~ M.j. Pullen

I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.

~ Peter James West

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

~ Peter James West

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.

~ Peter James West

Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.

~ Buffy Andrews

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink, that will cure you of persiflage!

~ Hilary Mantel

I read your diary. I KNOW.

~ Mary Papas

The only man she ever loved. And hated.

~ Mary Papas

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

~ Steven Pressfield

Research is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING

~ Rayne Hall

To get over artist's block, make shitty art.

~ Dave Horowitz

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

~ Rayne Hall

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

~ Mo Yan

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.

~ Bell Hooks

Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.

~ Jessica E. Larsen