Editors are licensed to be curious.

~ William Zinsser

William Zinsser Curiosity Writing

Yet I am incapable of writing the only kind of novel which interests me: a book powered with an intellectual or moral passion strong enough to create order, to create a new way of looking at life. It is because I am too diffused. I have decided never to write another novel. I have fifty 'subjects' I could write about; and they would be competent enough. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that competent and informative novels will continue to pour from the publishing houses. I have only one, and the least important, of the qualities necessary to write at all, and that is curiosity. It is the curiosity of the journalist.

~ Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Art Curiosity Journalist Writing

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

~ Pat Conroy

Pat Conroy Curiosity Writing

Love is the best drug, bar none.

~ Crystal Woods

Crystal Woods Addiction Drug Drugs High Love Lust Substance Abuse The Best Writing

Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.

~ Chris Baty

Chris Baty Arcs Tangents Writing Writing Process

It was the worst--the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating--writing experience I'd had...I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.

~ Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

Well, I like him. There’s a darkness to him. But does he make it all the way through?”She shrugged. “It’s entirely up to him.”“What do you mean?” He smiled quizzically at her.“Characters talk to you. Transform. Make choices,” she replied.“Choices,” he echoed.“Of who they become.

~ Nancy Holder

Nancy Holder Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

A chef’s magic is his ingredients, how he can substitute one for another, then break with convention by changing it all around again without once referring to the recipe. And then just at the death complete the beauty by adding another element never previously thought of. Well words are the writer’s sorcery, our dark arts and our sleight of hand. They’re our enchantment and our temptation. Sometimes both the chef and the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.

~ Karl Wiggins

Karl Wiggins Chef Chefs Cooking Cooking Quotes Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

By applying their observational abilities along with full appliance of their logic and creative powers, writers attempt to create mental maps to share with other people regarding what they learned, think, and believe. The writer’s vision can sway readers emotional state and in doing influence what they believe and how they behave.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Communication Skills Writers On Thinking Writers On Writing Writers On Writing Books Writing Writing Process

Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Essay Essay Writing Essayist Essays Personal Essay Personal Essays Vision Quest Writers On Thinking Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process

A writer must be willing to leave oneself behind in order to explore new territories of the mind and unearth primordial truths that startle and frighten us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Self Discovery Self Discovery Quotes Writing Writing Process

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

~ Ben Tolosa

Ben Tolosa Writers On Writing Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

~ M.v. Carey

M.v. Carey Writers On Writing Writing Writing Process

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

~ M.v. Carey

M.v. Carey Writers On Writing Writing Writing Process

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

~ M.v. Carey

M.v. Carey Writers On Writing Writing Writing Process

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

~ Flannery O'connor

Flannery O'connor Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

But today, something begins to shift. I see that there might be some way I can take the raw material of my life and transform it into something that has order and structure. I can make sense of what, until now, has been senseless.

~ Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro How To Write Writers Quotes Writing Writing Process

If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

~ Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett Writing Writing Advice Writing Process Writing Quotes

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

~ Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh Writing Writing Advice Writing Craft Writing Process Writing Quotes

Being a writer, I think, is much like being a parent or a pet parent in my case. I love all of my characters equally, even if I want you to hate them, I love them. If you don't love all your characters you're not doing it right.

~ Ellie Elisabeth

Ellie Elisabeth Author Advice Writing Writing Process

Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.

~ William Inge

William Inge Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

~ Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín R. Kiernan Writing Writing Process

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

~ Linda Flower

Linda Flower Cognition Cognitive Functioning Writing Writing Advice Writing Process

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

~ Samuel S. Vaughan

Samuel S. Vaughan 1969 Editing Iao Formula Writing Writing Process

Writing entails undertaking a spiritual journey, an exploration of the blemished self that is delightfully challenging, painfully arduous, and unfathomably rewarding. Writing allows an admittedly flawed person to artfully confront their inglorious personal history, examine the present, and cogitate upon the future. Thoughtful writing creates a person’s own precursors: it revises a person’s conception of the past into a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive philosophical context, alters how a person perceives the “now,” and alters the course and outcome person’s future. Writing is the ultimate psychological experience and an immaculate method to examine a person’s thoughts, debunk a person’s delusion, and analyze a person’s values.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Self Development Self Examination Self Exploration Self Growth Writing Writing Process

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

~ James Baldwin

James Baldwin James Baldwin Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

There's no rule for better writing. Make your own rules, and see what works best for you.

~ Tarang Sinha

Tarang Sinha Writing Writing Process

Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the words and worry about them... Then your worry goes into them and they set about killing each other. So you keep going as long as you can, then look back and see what you have written. After a bit of practice and after telling yourself you are going to use any old word that comes into your head so long as it seems right, you will surprise yourself. You will read back through what you have written and you will get a shock. You will have captured a spirit, a creature.

~ Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes Creative Writing Poetry Writing Writing Process Young Writers

I suppose I had some meaning when I wrote it, I believe I understood it then.

~ George Gordon Byron

George Gordon Byron Writing Writing Process Writing Quotes

When I write, I enter a transpersonal state of consciousness, a lightheaded realm of mental imagination, a cognitive place where I can lithely finger the coherent and the absurd. I seek to cross over an intricate boarder where the conscious and unconscious minds meet, traversing the aperture where the real and the imaginary intermingle. I aspire to establish a detached vantage point where I can survey the entire human condition.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

~ Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante Writing Writing Process

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Writers On Writing Writers Quotes Writing Writing Process

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Kilroy J. Oldster Memoir Writing Writers On Writing Writing Writing Philosophy Writing Process Writing Quotes

It's okay to write a cliché in a first draft; it sets a marker that you can get far, far away from in the rewrites.

~ Stewart Stafford

Stewart Stafford Clichés First Drafts Originality Rewrites Rewriting Writing Writing Advice Writing Advice Process Writing Process

Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are just . . . writing crap and doodling and trying to have an idea and surfing the internet and hoping like hell not to get so distracted that you give up. Worse? Those five miles are lined with brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba waiting to talk to only you and really good novels to read. Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it. The more often I run the five miles, the fitter I become. And the fitter I become, the easier the run begins to feel and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road seems. I mean, how long has it been there? More important, as I get fitter, I can run faster. And the faster I can run, the faster I can get to that door. The faster you can too, writers out there. When you sit down to write every day, it becomes easier and easier to tap into that creative space inside your mind. The faster I can get to that door, the quicker I can get to the good stuff.

~ Shonda Rhimes

Shonda Rhimes Writing Writing Process

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the I’m a Fraud phase. You go through the I’ll Never Finish phase. And every once in a while you think, What if I actually have created what I set out to create, and it’s received as such?

~ Lin-Manuel Miranda

Lin-Manuel Miranda Writing Writing Process

But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it’s like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren’t allowed to make mistakes.

~ Karina Halle

Karina Halle Writers On Writing Writing Writing Process

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing, you're creating your own worlds.

~ Stephen King

Stephen King Writing Writing Craft Writing Process

My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.

~ Benjamin Haydon

Benjamin Haydon Providence Shakespeare Writing Writing Process

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.

~ Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante Cliché Writing Writing Craft Writing Process
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