Writing Quotes

Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a secondperhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.

~ Antonin Sertillanges

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

~ Merilyn Simonds

A writer is a messenger for the subconscious.

~ Mark Tilbury

Ideas are like wine. They get better when they have time to mature.

~ R.m. Arcejaeger

Ideas too sometimes fall from the tree before they are ripe.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ideas take root at the oddest moments. Some grow into novels, the weaker ones wither and die.

~ Pippa Dacosta

Writing is something I do everyday. If I waited for inspiration, I’d never get anything done.

~ Lawrence C. Connolly

We like to take credit when we get a new idea, as if we originated the idea in our brain, but what we actually did was no less extraordinary: we channeled the idea.

~ Chris Prentiss

We shared ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership.

~ Ann Patchett

Ideas are cheap. Writing them into a freakin' 90k word novel is the hard part.

~ Ellie Ann

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before.

~ Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

~ Red Red Rover

An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor.

~ Robert Frost

Ideas are the most fragile things in the world, and if you do not write them down, they will be lost forever.

~ Phil Cooke

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

~ Agatha Christie

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

~ Rod Serling

No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope.

~ William Faulkner

He was a humorist, and everyone knew the funny writers were the most serious sort under their skins.

~ Paula Mclain

Mohr was one of the most talented people on the staff of Time, in print as well as in person—the two are often different.

~ David Halberstam

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

~ Tom Clancy

Writing is a process of creating yourself again and again for an ever-searching mind.

~ Debasish Mridha

My purpose of writing is to express my love for you,no matter, who you are, where you live or whatever you do.

~ Debasish Mridha

I am writing just to inspire you, encourage you, empower you, and give you hope when you are fighting your life's battle.

~ Debasish Mridha

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

~ Debasish Mridha

I am writing something very simple that will change you and change the world.

~ Debasish Mridha

Let your heart dance with pen and paperNow fill the paper with dancing letters.

~ Debasish Mridha

Writing is a great way of talking with an endless audience for never-ending time.

~ Debasish Mridha

Poetry is the beauty of life.

~ Debasish Mridha

Writing is an incurable psychological disease which only gets worse with writing.

~ Debasish Mridha

Write what you want to write, don't fear about who will read it.

~ Debasish Mridha

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

~ Douglas C. Engelbart

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

~ Sara Sheridan

In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood,' writes Dante, in The Divine Comedy, beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales: young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and left for dead. The road is long and treacherous, prowled by wolves, ghosts, and wizards — but helpers also appear along the way, good fairies and animal guides, often cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

~ Terri Windling

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking each major transition in the human life cycle: puberty, marriage, childbirth, menopause, death. Other rites–of–passage, less predictable but equally transformative, include times of sudden change and calamity such as illness and injury, the loss of one’s home, the death of a loved one, etc. These are the times when we wake, like Dante, to find ourselves in a deep, dark wood — an image that in Jungian psychology represents an inward journey. Rites–of–passage tales point to the hidden roads that lead out of the dark again — and remind us that at the end of the journey we’re not the same person as when we started. Ascending from the Netherworld (that grey landscape of illness, grief, depression, or despair), we are ‘twice–born’ in our return to life, carrying seeds — new wisdom, ideas, creativity and fecundity of spirit.

~ Terri Windling

It feels good to read book. But it is grander to write book.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

~ Jack Kerouac

A school for the writing of nonsense and the pursuit of extraordinary activities.

~ David Almond

Here is a lesson to brand in fire across any young historian's mind: If you try to do too much, you will not do anything.

~ Richard Marius

Josh Funk and Hunter Fraser: we haven't been in touch in years, but you made me feel like the funniest kid in the world. I would stay up late on school nights to write things to try to make you laugh the next day in class, and you inspired the one piece of advice on writing that I've ever felt qualified to give: write for the kid sitting next to you.

~ B.j. Novak

There is a point where, as a writer, you grow to hate your characters, their stupid motivations, and their whiny inner dialogues. The only solution I have found to deal with that is to kill the character, resurrect him, then kill him again.

~ Caris O'malley