Writing Quotes

There’s nothing worse than being violently jerked away from creativity.

~ Aaron B. Powell

My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum…I was writing my essay, writing easily now. I didn’t have a reader anymore like Lee or Chris but I imagined that I was writing for them both. Maybe I was writing for anyone who could fucking stand me.

~ Tamara Faith Berger

What immense satisfaction it must be to fashion a story like [Maupassant's]! One must say 'fashion' because it is not merely writing, but massing and cutting away like a sculptor, chiseling lean and clear. And to put one's work confidently in the crucible of Time; to know that in six perfect pages is the finest form of one's idea: This satisfaction is the only true reward of the artist, and this his highest possible joy on Earth.

~ Patricia Highsmith

Be a burst of joy.

~ A.d. Posey

After each of his books, the writer, for a while, feels once again that he can now die happy.

~ Criss Jami

The joy of writing is the fullness of existence.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Each day, write a thankful note.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Writing comes from the fear of failure not from the joy of winning.

~ Debasish Mridha

Good poetry reveals the beauty of joy and tragedy.

~ Debasish Mridha

Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas.

~ Criss Jami

As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.

~ Criss Jami

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

~ Neil Gaiman

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strangers, be it a smile, a pat on the shoulder or a word of praise, is truly a comfort.

~ Yann Martel

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

~ Gary Shteyngart

The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become--and such lucidity is a form of joy.

~ Eva Hoffman

I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper. (The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi)

~ Rikki Ducornet

Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic...

~ J.k. Rowling

The ScribeUnder the wingsOf the feathered Goddess,And in the middleOf the three dancing women,The scribe comes aliveTo reveal mysteries hiddenThrough divine gifts givenThe scribe is drivenOn his sacred missionTo wake upAll the universe'sMen, women andHeavenly children.Under the seven rays of Aten,And from the age of just ten,The scribe comes aliveWith the fertile inkOf his luminous pen.Below the spectacle of the moon,And in the smile of the sun,The scribe is here to show usHow we are all one.

~ Suzy Kassem

My mother is changing history. She is making her balalaika-smashing mother into a heroine. Does she want me to do the same for her? Is that what good children do for their parents? What about good writers?

~ Gary Shteyngart

Are you keeping up your good studies at school and working as hard as you always did?

~ Diane Samuels

A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might put the aims and the solution unrealistically high – in the same way that folktales tend to be about kings and queens – but this is because it is better to aim for the moon and get halfway there than just to aim for the roof and get halfway upstairs.

~ Diana Wynne Jones

Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don’t have the fucking part in writing a book.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Are you imperfect, romantically irrational, ridiculously fearless, and utterly illogical? You're my ideal reader, friend, partner. I'm your fan.

~ Brook Tesla

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

~ James Van Pelt

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

~ Eudora Welty

Human life is fiction's only theme.

~ Eudora Welty

The commercial work of today is the classics of tomorrow.

~ Orson Scott Card

You have seven writers in your basement?”Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.

~ Susan Wiggs

Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don't get it. It's amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together''Yeah, well, that's a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)

~ Haruki Murakami

I gave up worrying about the principles of fiction writing when I realized that there weren't any.

~ Teri Louise Kelly

Too many words for one book--truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

~ David Benioff

I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a non-existent one.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life. This has been the case with me. Connections slowly emerge. Like distant landmarks you are approaching, cause and effect begin to align themselves, draw closer together. Experiences too indefinite of outline in themselves to be recognized for themselves connect and are identified as a larger shape. And suddenly a light is thrown back, as when your train makes a curve, showing that there has been a mountain of meaning rising behind you on the way you've come, is rising there still, proven now through retrospect. Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever lost.

~ Eudora Welty

My father did not bring it up, but of course I knew that he had another reason to worry about my decision to write. Though he was a reader, he was not a lover of fiction, because fiction is not true, and for that flaw it was forever inferior to fact. If reading fiction was a waste of time, so was the writing of it. Why is it, I wonder, that humor didn't count? Wodehouse, for one, whom both of us loved, was a flawless fiction writer.

~ Eudora Welty

Writing isn't black magic. You just have to come up with an idea...

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

I often tell my students that fiction is about desire in one way or another. The older I get, the more I understand that life is generally the pursuit of desires. We want and want and oh how we want. We hunger.

~ Roxane Gay

As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.

~ Charlie Jane Anders

One thing an early-on writer has to learn, is to be comfortable with and responsive to critique. When five people in a group tell you this chapter sucks; don’t snap back at them with, “Sure, but it gets better in another 6 or 7 chapters!”Listen. – Thank them. – Consider.They can look from a fresh perspective, and catch things that you might be too close to see.But, you will also learn along the way that not everyone in a group of relative amateurs themselves, is going to catch everything, and there will be a few who seem to never understand much of anything.Some will always want paragraphs chopped down to explosive missiles of passion, while others are more used to long composite paragraphs that I myself find impossible to wade through.You may, once you have hit your full stride and power, feel comfortable telling a few of them, “Look. This isn’t a diner. I don’t take orders: ‘I’m gluten intolerant; he can’t do salt; she’s allergic to peanuts ...’“If what I offer is a salad bar, then No; I am not going to fry you up a cheesesteak!

~ Edward Fahey

Great characters- They are pivotal for a great plot. THEN a solid plot: Why then? If you do not have great characters it is impossible to create a good plot, nonetheless a solid one. Once you have built great characters for the scenes, there you have it. It’s just like the movies, you cannot have a great film if the characters are frail and their lines are weak as well. I guess great world-building comes along with a good plot. If there is something that will work fine in a novel is how you will develop from the theme. You’ve got to establish a good timeline, and from there it comes a world. You see the technical matters don’t match or matter as much to me. Even a poorly written story, if there is a good plot and great characters on it will make a divine combination There are simply many cases of it over the mainstream and that even reached the big screen.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

~ Salman Rushdie