Writing Quotes

Honesty is vulnerability. Sadly, not everyone can handle someone’s honesty. However, lying allows people to be comfortable.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

~ J.g. Ballard

She said that in writing anything, you must be perfectly honest.

~ Lesley Choyce

A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.

~ Sandra Chami Kassis

Wondering is positive illusion.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

~ Betty Smith

A lie set down on paper in wet ink becomes the truth when dry.

~ Manhattan (Writer)

Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won’t get mixed up.

~ Betty Smith

I wrote home to say how lovely everything was, and I used flourishing words and phrases, as if I were living life in a greeting card - the kind that has a satin ribbon on it, and quilted hearts and roses, and is expected to be so precious to the person receiving it that the manufacturer has placed a leaf of plastic on the front to protect it.

~ Jamaica Kincaid

I am smiling a big adopted-orphan smile as I write this ... I still love scribbling the word - WRITER - any time on a form, questionnaire, document asks for my occupation. Fine, I write personality quizzes, I don't write about the Great Issues of the Day, but I think it's fair to say I am a writer ... ('Adopted-orphan smile', I mean, that's not bad, come on.)

~ Gillian Flynn

Don't be afraid to write. I think a lot of writers of all ages have a fear that they aren't any good at writing. That fear is normal. I feel it. Most writers who care about what they are writing feel it. When you feel like you're not good enough, write anyway. It's just a pesky bug that's whispering lies. The best way to swat the bug is with your pen.

~ Tanya Anderson

To my faithful readers, because a book is like a pie—the only thing more satisfying than cooking up the story is knowing that somebody might be out there eating it up with a spoon.

~ Sarah Weeks

I would rather spend money on something, that fulfills me for eternity. Rather, than something that fulfills me for only an hour or two.

~ Mary Sage Nguyen

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

~ Raymond Chandler

Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.

~ Harley King

Writing is a product of silence.

~ Carrie Latet

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

have written my first grateful thanks for a fresh new day in a new year.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For me, all writing -- storytelling and style -- gets back to the Bible, Twain and Hemingway, and not in that order.

~ Dennis R. Miller

Storytelling? God started that. Discovery. Lust. Murder. Revenge. Power. Sin. Redemption. Forgiveness. Miracles. We simply retell the stories in the language of our generation.

~ Dennis R. Miller

When you write something down, it stays forever.It's like a little part of you that you're giving to the universe

~ Emma Abdullah

My writings are my letters to the universe, who loved me like a mother.

~ Debasish Mridha

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you

~ Neil Gaiman

You express yourself through written words. You’re a writer.

~ Tara Sue Me

Does any program really improve anybody, as much as simply identifying them? And, after identifying them, not ruining them?

~ Chang-Rae Lee

In this world where I sit at my desk writing these words, people die, they pass on, people are mortal. In the cyber world we inhabit they do not.

~ Aysha Taryam

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

~ Slash Coleman

. . . None of us are born as passive generic blobs waiting for the world to stamp its imprint on us. Instead we show up possessing already a highly refined and individuated soul.Another way of thinking of it is: We're not born with unlimited choices.We can't be anything we want to be.We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who we are from the cradle, and we're stuck with it.Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.

~ Steven Pressfield

Writing to her, I was no longer lonely... I could tolerate anything as long as I had a notepad and a pen and could pour my heart out to her in these letters.

~ Portia De Rossi

There were many words piled up inside my chest, stories waiting to be told. I wanted to hand all this knowledge to one other person, neither a master nor a disciple. I sought an equal - a companion.

~ Elif Shafak

A journey of the mind – a written vision quest – has only one goal: to interact with the world and attempt to develop the dormant intellectual and spiritual awareness of the author.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

The best stories come from deep within us and are of us. Either our inner child comes out to play and makes all things possible, or we mold our characters and events from our own experiences, or our dreams of wanting to experience.

~ Judith Kohnen

Warrior of the night must be awake to write the sacred words.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I wish to keep writing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I am determined to write daily.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Every great writer is a great reader.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

~ Milan Kundera

Now the second common characteristic of fiction follows from this, and it is that fiction is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him. This doesn't mean he has to identify himself with the character or feel compassion for the character or anything like that. It just means that fiction has to be largely presented rather than reported. Another way to say it is that though fiction is a narrative art, it relies heavily on the element of drama.

~ Flannery O'connor

Personal discontent and lost illusion is the catalysis and the principal theme for every book ever written. The sign of maturity is when a person finally realizes that they would rather live truthfully than persist indulging his or her comforting delusions.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I don't know who a character is till I look into their eyes.

~ Luke Taylor