Writing Quotes

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

~ Pat Conroy

The panther that has stalked yousince you were a childis old now. No longer wild,and tired of guarding the treasureyou yourself left behind - blind and deaf, she will give it all to youif you just let her go.

~ Pat Schneider

This is what books only aimed to do and never could. Give you the glint of someone else's sunrise, what living is really like, you get old and it hurts to bend your elbow; your friends start to die, you can’t get fresh fruit in the shops.

~ Geoff Ryman

I want to know how good at life I can be in a place where there are no distractions.

~ Nell Stevens

Discipline, not the Muse, results in productivity. If you write only when she beckons, your writing is not yours at all.

~ Kenneth Atchity

English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.

~ Dean Wesley Smith

That economics has a considerable conceptual apparatus with an appropriate terminology can not be a serious ground for complaint. Economic phenomena, ideas, instruments of analysis exist. They require names. Education in economics is, in considerable measure, an introduction to this terminology and to the ideas that it denotes. Anyone who has difficulties with the ideas should complete his education or, following an exceedingly well-beaten path, leave the subject alone. It is sometimes said that the economist has a special obligation to make himself understood because his subject is of such great and popular importance. By this rule the nuclear physicist would have to speak in monosyllables.

~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Words are the writer's sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They're our enchantment and our temptation

~ Karl Wiggins

A book is not just a collection of words, it is a perception portrayed on blank sheets. You know, getting you the feelings of blowing winds and rains and sun and flowers around, the smiles, the tears, the notional links with the characters and make them all alive, while you read. And that's sure as hell a gruelling task !

~ Syed Arshad

If your career doesn’t work out, write a book about it.

~ Marcy Sheiner

What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.

~ Alice W. Flaherty

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

~ Don Roff

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

~ Margaret Atwood

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writing is mostly a case of mood management. The emotion you have is not absolute, it is temporary. It may be useful, but it is not the truth. It is not you.

~ Anne Enright

I feel like I've been through a lot in the past couple of years, But I've kept pretty stable. That's because I channel that emotion into performance. I can handle emotion as long as it's only a song. It works for me, and I don't want to change it. I don't have anything left for writing.

~ Jennifer Echols

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases.

~ Willa Cather

Don't think of what you have to do, don't consider how to carry it out! he exclaimed. The shot will only go smoothly when it takes the archer himself by surprise.

~ Eugen Herrigel

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

~ Eugen Herrigel

I’ve written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they’ve been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

~ Pat Conroy

There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All the perfumes of Arabia' makes you think of all the perfumes of Arabia and nothing more. It is the trouble with all metaphors where human behavior is concerned. People are not ships, chess men, flowers, race horses, oil paintings, bottles of champagne, excrement, musical instruments or anything else but people. Metaphors are all right to give you an idea.)

~ John O'hara

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

~ Christa Wolf

I hope to turn my reader into the quiet person in the corner who, even when no one is telling them anything, sees everything.

~ Damali Ayo

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

~ Sol Stein

Honestly...this is why I write.I write to get the happy ending I sometimes feel is eluding me.I write for my sanity.

~ Debora Dennis

He hiccupped and continued: I write therefore I come...But unfortunately, my orgies are never eternal!...

~ Fiston Mwanza Mujila

I write humor as it's pretty much the only thing keeping me out of an asylum.

~ Bonnie Daly

Proceed with caution when you befriend a writer, for if you fall out of their good graces they have the delightful capability of doing any number of dastardly things to you upon the written page.

~ Bonnie Daly

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

~ Marietta Rodgers

LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.

~ Colin Nissan

When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.

~ Carla H. Krueger

This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You're not doing it right.

~ Elizabeth Strout

I was suppose to write a book about being a mom, to organize my thoughts into chapters and figure out a structure to hang them on, to make a lasting point, but somehow I decided to go ahead and become a mother instead.

~ Jeanne Marie Laskas

The artist and the mother are vehicles, not originators. They don't create the new life, they only bear it. This is why birth is such a humbling experience. The new mom weeps in awe at the little miracle in her arms. She knows it came out of her but not from her, through her but not of her.

~ Steven Pressfield

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

~ Rafael Sabatini

I write erotica: sexy, raunchy fiction with the goal of getting your mind tuned in and your body turned on! Looking forward to sharing my steamy stories!

~ Shayna York

It's a good thing, right, when an author gets turned on by the dirty scenes they write?!

~ Martha Sweeney

Why fantasize about what you already experience? I go to the written word for places and faces that I don't get at home. Hot people in hot climates. Sex acts I can hardly imagine. Porn is about the unachievable ... and, therefore, the inherently desirable.

~ Belle De Jour

I want my writing to bring people not just to think of trees as they mostly do now, but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.

~ Roger Deakin

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

~ Milan Kundera