Writing Quotes

If you don't know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.

~ Anne Lamott

But we [writers] are crucial. That is what I hope you have learned. We listen for and collect and share stories. Without stories there is no nation and no religion and no culture. Without stories of bone and substance and comedy there is only a river of lies, and sweet and delicious ones they are, too. We are the gatherers, the shepherds, the farmers of stories. We wander widely and look for them and gather them and harvest them and share them as food. It is a craft as necessary and nutritious as any other, and if you are going to be good at it you must double your humility and triple your curiosity and quadruple your ability to listen.

~ Brian Doyle

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

~ Alice Munro

I am a huge believer in revelations and fun twists.

~ Darynda Jones

You lay claim to your stories; you honor, with your hard work and the best of your talent, their inspirations, and you fight to tell them well from a sense of indebtedness and thankfulness. The ambiguities, the contradictions, the complexities of your choices are always with you in your writing as they are in your life. You learn to live with them. You trust your need to have a dialogue about what you deem important.

~ Bruce Springsteen

Not everyone loves to read, but everyone loves stories. Some stories are told with words, some with paint, and some with music. Some are filmed, others are set on a stage. Some are sculpted from clay or woven in thread, and some are even explored in video games. The best ones are from other people, because they are raw and unique. But however they come, stories are powerful because they create something out of nothing: courage out of fear, knowledge out of ignorance, and hope out of despair.

~ Trudy Adams

A story that has nothing but action and plot is a pretty poor affair, and some great stories have neither.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Dante Alighieri wrote his first book in the prosimetrum genre – La Vita Nuova – in 14th century Florence. Since I’m compiling this collection – my first indie publication – in Florence, just blocks from Dante’s house, and since his book involves a lost love, and ‘A New Life,’ I thought it fitting to emulate this style in my own casual, intuitive fashion. My hope is that the juxtaposition of poems, journal entries, essays and prose will create a story; a memoir in anarchistic vignettes.

~ Jalina Mhyana

Every human being carries with them the stories of their ancestors, the story of their generation, and the rudiments of pliable clay to build future storylines that will shape their community of kindred souls. Storytelling unites us as a species and supplies texture to our lives. By listening to other people’s stories and by sharing our personal story, we deftly weave the threads that compose the sacred hoop of the tribe.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Listen. You will still only love me. And I will only love you. It’s only that we’ll have different names. Sometimes I’ll be Augusta, queen of Gondal, and you’ll be a dangerous highwayman. Sometimes we’ll be Alexander and Zenobia, the young lovers. Sometimes… sometimes we will just be two lonely children roaming the moors together. But the ‘he’ of the story will always be you, and the 'she’ of the story will always be me. Forever.

~ Lena Coakley

From an author's point of view, the most painful and dangerous weapon ain't no gun or blade, but a piece of paper with the word rejected on it.

~ Anonymous

Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and why we have lived.

~ Umberto Eco

They both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends, and their favorite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:Ma'am... or, Kind gentleman... have you a little story to tell us, please?And it seldom happened that they did not have one given them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the korrigans dance by moonlight on the heather.

~ Gaston Leroux

Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.

~ R.m. Engelhardt (Talon)

The vast majority of you are going to close this tab without, even for a single moment, entertaining the thought of writing something. Step outside your comfort zone and try something new. Learning the fine rationalist art of CoZE (comfort zone expansion) is a really important life skill, and putting your writing online is a low-risk way to do that. Don't try to cop out with I don't have any stories. Baloney. Everyone has stories; write up a memory that's important to you. And don't even try to tell me, Oh, but I don't know how to write! Neither did I when I started; I learned by doing. So please, set the excuses aside, put something up on the web, and share it with the rest of us. When you do, drop me a PM; I'll leave you your first review, but you have to publish something first. Well? What are you waiting for? Seriously. Go write one sentence of a new story, write now.

~ David K. Storrs

Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won't save it.

~ Thomas C. Foster

I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

Those who perpetrate stories must act cruelly.

~ Johnny Rich

Mythology is like a game of Chinese Whispers. What goes in at one end of the human circle is rarely what emerges at the other end.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

I contend that good children's stories are always about the Getting of Wisdom. That's another way of saying, Let your characters grow. Up. And good stories for adults are about the Holding of Wisdom. Another way of saying, Recognize you are grown up.

~ Jane Yolen

A good story is [a] kind of irritant. You read it, then you cannot stop thinking about it. Eventually, your mind and heart encyst about it, and what occurs is a pearl of the soul.

~ Jane Yolen

Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story—whether it’s happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is—depends entirely on where you start it and where you end it.

~ Judith Ryan Hendricks

Some of the best stories start out with a person who absolutely does not want anything to do with an adventure.

~ Josh Rose

[W]e wouldn't want to read a book about a perfect character who never struggles with character flaws, a difficult past, or interpersonal conflict. Writers can powerfully connect with readers when they venture to these thin places of pain and brokenness because readers can see themselves in the pain and want to journey from pain and struggle toward redemption or some kind of resolution.

~ Ed Cyzewski

A story is inside of us all. Each word and sentence is alive and we grace the pages to keep it from dying.

~ Aisha Mirza

Write and your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

~ Don Roff

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning.

~ James Plath

But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.

~ Andrew Lang

Maybe we guzzle forty stories with every breath we draw and they soak into us and flavor and thicken and spice the wild stew we are.

~ Brian Doyle

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.

~ Aristotle

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow significant. But really, it’s not their personal lives that matter, but their own, hard-fought-for ideas. Not just anybody’s ideas, but the ideas that they have paid for with their suffering and their sacrifices and their love of their fellow humans.

~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.

~ Niall Williams

Every good story needs a good, bad and lost soul. A people to fight for, an item to turn the tide of battle, an enigmatic character, a motivator/mentor, and an unlikely reluctant hero.

~ Josh Rose

I can’t protect you from the stars, but I can tell you stories that may help at night when they are staring at you.

~ Karen Hines

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

~ Sara Sheridan

Follow your gut, Storyteller, it will lead to your happy ending.

~ Isabel Greenberg

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book. In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness… The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them. We all need stories, but children are more frank about it.

~ Philip Pullman