Writing Quotes

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.

~ May Sarton

All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.

~ Michael Stutz

What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.

~ Allison K. Williams

Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.

~ Quinn Anderson

Always write as if you will never have the blessed chance to write again, so this has to be the best thing you've ever done. Do that, and it will be.

~ Joe Gores

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person’s level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

~ Joanna Penn

When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.

~ Joanna Penn

Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.

~ Joanna Penn

When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.

~ Joanna Penn

At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?

~ Karl Ove Knausgård

Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.

~ Natalie Goldberg

The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.

~ Stewart Stafford

It is infinitely easier to experience an indescribable experience than to describe it.

~ Kevin Focke

Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.

~ Chloe Thurlow

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.

~ Mary Oliver

As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness.

~ Gloria D. Gonsalves

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicatea preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.

~ Mary Oliver

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain

~ Susan Reynolds

There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.

~ Mindy Kaling

Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Never wait for your muse. Train him/her to show up to work when you do by pushing on. It's a dominant submission thing.

~ Darynda Jones

Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn't always know what it is.

~ Carla H. Krueger

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

~ Annie Dillard

Writers, by nature, are going to be slightly more delusional than others because we're dreamers, we imagine the unlikely, that's how we create... Rather than hoping my delusion becomes a reality, I'd prefer to keep on being deluded, to dream bigger and to imagine greater. My greater worry would be becoming less delusional .

~ Rowena Wiseman

...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.

~ Alaa Al Aswany

Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.

~ Carla H. Krueger

I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there's a good chance you were not called.

~ Robin Caldwell

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.

~ Jeffrey A. Carver

Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.

~ Rob Bignell

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .

~ Philip Roth

Words writers choose are a glimmering reflection into our souls.

~ Lee Bice-Matheson-Matheson

A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.

~ Robert Benson

Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.

~ Rob Bignell