Writing Quotes

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

~ Chila Woychik

You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.

~ Christy Hall

Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

~ Christy Hall

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

~ Chila Woychik

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

~ Chila Woychik

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

~ Stendhal

Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.

~ Barbara Abercrombie

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. In my mind, they were a whole lot better.Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

~ David Morrell

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

~ Isabel Huggan

I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.

~ Peter James West

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

~ Peter James West

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.

~ Peter James West

The only man she ever loved. And hated.

~ Mary Papas

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

~ Steven Pressfield

Research is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING

~ Rayne Hall

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

~ Rayne Hall

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .

~ Lee Gutkind

It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.

~ Django Wylie

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

~ Caron Kamps Widden

Writing is the act of discovery.

~ Natalie Goldberg

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

~ Billie Sue Mosiman

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.

~ Donald Richie

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.

~ Donald Richie

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

~ Eric Maisel

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

~ Neil Young

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb snuffle.

~ Rachelle Mccalla

To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.

~ Michele Garber

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.

~ Steven Pressfield

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

~ Anne Lamott

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

~ Robert Hughes

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

~ Leo Rosten

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

~ Graham Swift

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death.

~ Kate Forsyth

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

~ Richard Curtis

Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it... the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing the voices in your head became a permanent fixture :) ... oh, missed one out - You sleep it!

~ Patti Roberts

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

~ T.l. Rese

You’re a loner in body, mind, and soul. A writer who spends a day of solitude in the office is plagued by a mind that travels with the body. The work never stops.

~ Bruce Obee

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.

~ Joe Orton