Writing Quotes

Storytelling is a dangerous vocation, for the fairies punish those who return to tell their secrets.

~ Marina Warner

To tell a story is always to translate the raw material into a specific shape, to select out of the boundless potential facts those that seem salient.

~ Rebecca Solnit

My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]

~ Pierre Berton

Remember that writing things down makes them real; that it is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know; and, most of all, that even in our post-postmodern era, writing has a moral purpose. With twenty-six shapes arranged in varying patterns, we can tell every story known to mankind, and make up all the new ones—indeed, we can do so in most of the world’s known tongues. If you can give language to experiences previously starved for it, you can make the world a better place.

~ Andrew Solomon

Your whole life and the story of your journey is the landscape picture on the front of the box of a 1,000 piece puzzle. The pieces are each a small sticky note that ends in mid-sentence. You simply need to figure out where each one starts and ends.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

These are old words, old stories and we are not here to blindly repeat them. They are not law. They are power, nourishment. There is a river of voices coming out of the past, resonating in the telling of the old stories...We are grounded in its power. It is our connection to each other and to the larger universe.

~ Robert William Case

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and laughter 'til they bloom, 'til you yourself burst into bloom.

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

~ Aristotle

Stories matter. They shape our lives, expectations, and dreams. They are the warp and weave of our human existence, binding us into a fabric far stronger than any individual element

~ Bascomb James

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story. Hurston understood that. But then she and I write out of despised cultures that on some level we feel we're defending.

~ Dorothy Allison

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

~ Sara Sheridan

We make our lives bigger or smaller, more expansive or more limited, according to the interpretation of life that is our story.

~ Christina Baldwin

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

~ Sara Sheridan

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it shor

~ Henry David Thoreau

Storytellers think they're writing for the audience. They're writing, in a way, to hurt the audience.

~ Chuck Wendig

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than you, and there will always be smarter writers than you, and there will always be, you know, people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.

~ Neil Gaiman

Every story is a ride to some place and time other than here and now. Buried in an armchair, reclined on a couch, prostrate on your bed, or glued to your desk, you can go places and travel through time.

~ A.a. Patawaran

The heart is a repository of emotions--real, imagined, and invented, owned and borrowed, past, present, future--and there in your chest, operating at an average of 80 beats per minute at rest, is a heart that has stories to tell.

~ A.a. Patawaran

Write in pictures. With your words, let the reader see not letters, but images. Be specific about every detail, but don't describe it--make it happen on the page, if you were writing fiction, or make it happen over again, if you were writing about history or some recent event.

~ A.a. Patawaran

Don't resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.

~ Patricia Hamill

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps AllREALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time

~ Lisa Cron

Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of the magic of storytelling. Like the troubadors of the past, who hid their messages in poems, songs and fairy tales, I too would hide my true purpose [ … ] It was by telling stories that I would save myself.

~ Kate Forsyth

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

~ Nalo Hopkinson

When I get tired of new clunky writing, I resort to old fashioned story tellers, like Wilkie Collins.

~ Sonia Rumzi

In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they know you well enough not only to say, 'It's Tuesday, Amy must be helping out at the library today,' but well enough to say to the librarian, after you've left the building, 'You know, Amy just loves reading to the four-year-olds, I think it's been such a comfort for her since her little boy died'—if they know you like that, you can do almost anything where they can't see you, and when they hear about it, they will, as we do, simply disbelieve the narrator.

~ Amy Bloom

Statements make sense for somebody who needs advice. I’m not giving advice. I don’t instruct. At my best, I delight. That’s my job.

~ Ron Koertge

[The Internet] affects democracy... As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticized by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy.

~ Lawrence Lessig

I believe it’s incredibly important to write against [racial] stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes.

~ Justine Larbalestier

Surprise is when a prime minister is assassinated during his speech. Suspense is when an assassin lurks while the prime minister speaks. Balancing surprise and suspense is the job of the thriller writer.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

I should have been conceived during Woodstock, it’s in my blood: that burning desire to turn an absolute on its head and see what’s underneath. I’m as random as I can be and as responsible as I should be. Attempting to fuse the two makes for interesting days.

~ Chila Woychik

Your words are so powerful that they can breakhearts or fill them with joy. Your words havethe ability to comfort a wounded soul or shattersomeone’s confidence. Your words can act as yourmessengers of hope or a salve for a broken humanbeing.

~ Rachel C. Weingarten

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

~ Don Roff

Without the hard we stay too soft, and heaven is reduced to myths like life. Theology aside, it’s plain to see that God forbids we get too comfortable.

~ Chila Woychik

We read to know we’re not alone. We read because we are alone. We read and we are not alone. We are not alone.

~ Gabrielle Zevin

Today I am amused, and I haven't seen anyone yet.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

Writing is a solitary occupation.

~ Bernard Cornwell

I enjoy writing alone, naked and unbothered.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Maybe I can learn to live in a way that makes it worth writing about, and maybe I can actually become something more than this empty shell.

~ Charlotte Eriksson