Writing Life Quotes

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

~ Tiffany Madison

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for when, I have no particular schedules... afternoons are best, but I'm too lethargic for any real regime. When I'm in the flow of something I can do a regular 9 to 5; when I don't know where I'm going with an idea, I'm lucky if I do two hours of productive work. There is nothing more off-putting to a would-be novelist to hear about how so-and-so wakes up at four in the a.m, walks the dog, drinks three liters of black coffee and then writes 3,000 words a day, or that some other asshole only works half an hour every two weeks, does fifty press-ups and stands on his head before and after the creative moment. I remember reading that kind of stuff in profiles like this and becoming convinced everything I was doing was wrong. What's the American phrase? If it ain't broke...

~ Zadie Smith

I’m a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office’s waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.

~ Glen Hirshberg

When reading a book, one hopes it doesn’t turn into a painful process. Predictable is bad enough. Laborious is acceptable if the labor produces fruit. But with painfully bad writing, all one can do is grab a hatchet, slice off its head, and bury it.

~ Chila Woychik

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.

~ Katrina Monroe

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

~ Jack London

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

~ Grace Bridges

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

~ Neil Gaiman

Writing is the great invention of the world.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

~ R.j. Dennis

Panic strikes me when I think about a sentence that isn’t given the chance to live because I don’t have a pen in my hand or am not sitting near enough to someone familiar to speak it to. Especially if it’s a particularly good sentence, a sentence with truth or beauty or humor or sadness to it. The best ones always take you by surprise. They sneak into your head while you’re walking down the aisles at a supermarket, or flat-out assault you when you’re at your grandmother’s funeral, and you have to scramble to give the thought life before it’s gone forever. Cocktail napkins, palms, text messages sent to yourself.

~ Adi Alsaid

The internet is killing the art of writing. The big publish button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!-

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.

~ Jonathan Harnisch

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

~ E.b. White

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

~ Richard Peck

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

~ E.m. Forster

Writing starts with living.

~ L.l. Barkat

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Sometimes we don't know where we are going until we get there.

~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Life is a story, until I awake and saw life as a dream.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The greatest ideas are best conceive when we take time to relax.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Life will be empty without great stories to read.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We write to share our thoughts and our lives.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.

~ Núria Añó

If you surrender to your imagination, the story will write itself.

~ T.n. Suarez

Writing can be a long and winding road or a straightforward march to the finish.What matters is that you enjoy the journey.

~ T.n. Suarez

To strive in life, we must either read or write a story.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.

~ Anne Lamott

Manuscript rejections might tempt you to quit writing or querying. Don't.

~ T.n. Suarez

I hear you speak in songs of love, written for me only. And though I wander far too much, the path is rarely lonely.

~ Atalina Wright

She cured me of my sadness.

~ Avijeet Das

A writer is a dangerous friend. Everything you say, all of your life and experience, is fodder for our writing. We mean you no harm, but what you know and what you’ve done is unavoidably fascinating to us. Being friends with a writer is a bit like trying to keep a bear as a pet. They’re wonderful, friendly creatures, but they play rough and they don’t know their own strength or remember that they have claws. Choose the stories you tell to your writer friends carefully.

~ Randy Murray

All writers are demonic dreamers. Writing is an act of sharing experiences and offering of an individualistic perspective of our private attitudes pertaining to whatever topics of thought intrigues the author. Writing is a twitchy art, which attempts to employ linguist building blocks handed-down from past generations. Writers’ word choices form a structure of conjoined sentences when overlaid with the lingua of modern culture. Writers attempt to emulate in concrete form the synesthesia of our personal pottage steeped in our most vivid feelings. Writing a personal essay calls for us to sort out a jungle of lucid observations and express in a tangible technique our unique interpretation of coherent observations interlaced with that effusive cascade of yearning, the universal spice of unfilled desire, which turmoil of existential angst swamps us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing is pure sweet freedom.

~ J. Hale Turner

To increase the chances of a writer trying to kill themselves, cut off their hands.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Shigure: G'morning.Tohru: Good mo

~ Natsuki Takaya

If typos are God's way of keeping a writer humble, plot holes certainly keeps one on their knees.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

I had a few people ask me if I might one day write my own autobiography. I just told them, 'It's already being written; through my books.

~ T.s. Wieland