Writing Quotes

Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book (or story, or hopelessly long essay) that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper (which, let’s face it, was once a towering tree crowned with leaves and a home to birds). I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself.

~ Ann Patchett

Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek or to give explanations for what I was doing. This freedom lifted me to the heavens - where greater love, one that forgives everything and never allows you to feel abandoned, once again enveloped me.

~ Paulo Coelho

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

~ Dorothy Allison

If I could sleep with my arms around you, the ink could stay in the bottle.

~ Shelly King

We are all in wires, eventually, reduced to what we said, or didn't say, and what we wrote or didn't write, who loved or didn't love, or loved and lost and never told it except for writing in or to a book. We are all discarded, discordant, confusingly, and so I salute your bravery, book inscriber. Your heart is big enough for both of us, so that there is no room for mockery in me. Anyone willing to strip themselves this bare this fast this way deserves our breathlessness and our hearts' attention. Let's spend an hour, then longer, in contemplation. If you open, open all the way, or as much as you can bear, or else there's nothing here at all.

~ Ander Monson

Anything said is gone as soon as it leaves my lips. Things written down at least have a chance to leave a soft echo of what had been.

~ Chris Dietzel

For it is now to us itself ancient; and yet its maker was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.

~ Elizabeth Berg

I transform Work in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real Work - of writing.

~ Roland Barthes

. . . I understand that I was writing (recording) as well as seeking to right (to rectify) the wrong, and now, as I retell the tale, I realize that ‘I am still at the same subject’ still engaged in the same fearful and fierce activity–writing and seeking to right a mortal wrong. (86-87)

~ Sandra M. Gilbert

It had been so long since I'd written, really written, that I'd forgotten what it felt like--how it changed things, shifted everything. I'd forgotten how writing surprises you--how you sit down feeling one thing and come out feeling another--and that I'd never heard my dad's voice in my head like this before, never known I could feel this close to him again, that this letter from him might ever exist. But here it was.

~ Margo Rabb

As long as they talk about you, you're not really dead, as long as they speak your name, you continue. A legend doesn't die, just because the man dies.

~ Rod Serling

A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

Gently the waves would break (Lily heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr. Carmichael thought, shutting his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look years ago.

~ Virginia Woolf

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well and good. But I don't want to set out to influence people. I don't want to set out to change the world in any self-conscious way. That way leads to self-destruction; that way, you're pontificating, and that's dangerous and it's boring - you're going to put people right to sleep.

~ Ray Bradbury

A cup of tea is all I need to keep working.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I write to shed my tears.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We write from soul of the heart.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Every experience is story to be written.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

When you don't have the pressure of pleasing someone else and do something because you love doing it, that's when the best works are born.

~ Vishwas Mudagal

Before the house-maid had lit the fire the next day, or the sun gained any power over the cold, gloomy morning in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling against one of the window-seats for the sake of all the little light she could command from it, and writing as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her.

~ Jane Austen

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her,And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture.

~ Pablo Neruda

I would write my tears, weeping out my pain - I would empty my veins for ink.

~ Muse

The parts of me that hurt the worst want me to write something for them, but I can't. I don't know what to say. I'm lost in all this sadness, and so are they.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

Just know your lines and don't bump into the furniture.

~ Spencer Tracy

The longer the waiting, the longer the wondering.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Wondering leads to writing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still

~ Henry David Thoreau

Our lives are a novel being written. We are its author. Every action we encounter and every person we meet has a role and a place in our ultimate story. It is in our control to decide the level of how, who and what impacts us and how large a role we decide to assign each.

~ Mark W. Boyer

Oil may run out, liquidity may dry up, but as long as ink flows freely, the next chapter of Life will continue to be written.

~ Alex Morritt

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revi

~ Stephen King

In a suspended psychic state, writers cull words and symbols from the mystical world of memory, imagination, and intuition.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.

~ Tim Ingold

As a writer, I'm always at the mercy of my inspiration, my intuition, and my imagination.

~ Kate Collier

What's real and what's not? People we meet in books--Holden Caulfield, Captain Ahab, Huckleberry Finn, Harry Potter, Bilbo and Gandalf and Frodo-- can become more memorable, and more important to us than people with birth certificates and drivers' licenses. Characters spawned in an author's imagination find a home inside us. They make our lives richer. They become our best friends. They never disappoint. And they never die.

~ Michael R. French

Writing is something that you can learn only by doing. To become a writer, you need an imagination, which you clearly have. You need to read books, which you clearly do. And you need to write, which you don't yet do, but should.

~ Jeff Zentner

We wonder to write.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Small boys often produce their own plays; but usually the parts are not written out. They hardly need to be, for the main line of each character is always Stick 'em up! In these plays the curtain is always rung down on a set of corpses, for small boys are by nature through and uncompromising.

~ A.s. Neill

We go round and round trying to convince one another that our opinion makes more sense. And the only winner is time for making us look like fools by wasting it.

~ S.a. Tawks