Writing Quotes

Anything added can be subtracted, anything verbose can be simplified, anything missing can be found. Manuscripts are not books but negatives waiting for the fixer that turns them into prints.

~ Chloe Thurlow

You will do well not to write for money, not because you won't get rich doing it, but because writing fueled by that sort of motivation becomes dull and lifeless and mediocre.

~ Joyce Rachelle

If you're going to have a complicated story, you must work to a map; otherwise you can never make a map of it afterwards.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

The only way you'll find out if you have it in you is to get to work and see if you do. The only way to override your limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude is to produce. You have limitations. You are in some way inept. This is true of every writer, and it's especially true of writers who are twenty-six. You will feel insecure and jealous. How much power you give those feelings is entirely up to you.

~ Cheryl Strayed

You can swap the message around, and whatever the particular norm is, or whatever the particular message is, when you put your pet-peeve message before story, odds are you are going to bore the shit out of your reader.

~ Larry Correia

I am grateful to all my readers, you inspired me to keep writing.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

~ David Foster Wallace

Q: What do you think is magical about fiction?DFW: ... The first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way... There's another level... A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I'm sitting in a chair. There's real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn't make me feel less lonely... There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone--intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

~ David Foster Wallace

Writing is easy. Writing well is hard work.

~ Amy Joy

Your story must told.Live a life legacy- written book or notes.This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

~ George Orwell

You think you have no ‘talent’? Write anyway. lots of people with ‘talent’ don’t actually act on it. As long as you write, you will learn, you will improve, and you will be better than anyone claiming to have ‘talent.

~ M. Kirin

If the passage absolutely demands cursing, be moderate. A little of it goes a long way. I've seen beginning writers pepper curse words through sentence after sentence.'If you don't -blanking- get your -blanking-blank-blank- in to this house this -blanking- minute, I'm going to -blank- your -blank- and nail it to the -blanking- door.'Two things happen when I read this junk: I get bored and I get angry. I didn't pick up your book to read garbage. If this is as clever as you can be, I don't want to read your prose. In life if you met someone who spoke like this, you'd want to flee. Then why put this stuff on the page?As near as I can determine, this abomination occurs because a writer is corrupted by the awful -blanking- dialog that movies inflict on us these days. It's also a sign of insecurity. The writer wonders if the dialog is strong enough and decides a lot of -blanking-blank- will do the trick.Someone might object that this kind of dialog is realistic in certain situations--intense scenes involving policemen or soldiers for example. I can only reply that in my research I spend considerable time with policemen and soldiers. Few of them curse any more than a normal person would. This garbage isn't realistic. It merely draws attention to itself and holds back the story. Use it sparingly.

~ David Morrell

We don’t read to observe the character from a distance. We read to become the character and experience the conflicts and rewards they are experiencing.

~ Darynda Jones

Let at least one word of my writings impregnate the reader's heart.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

~ Mark Twain

While the goal of a book is to create a positive emotional experience for the reader, the goal of the opening is to set the stage, to pull the reader in.

~ Darynda Jones

Step back and scrutinize your work, to delve deep into the meaning behind the words, it will get both easier in some ways and harder in others. Either way, you need to practice everyday. You will probably get faster with time, because you learn to do this instinctively, and the writing may flow better on some days more than others, but it doesn’t get easier. And if you aren’t writing everyday, you are doing yourself and your craft a disservice. Writing is a habit. Get into the habit.

~ Darynda Jones

If you can master the opening, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

~ Darynda Jones

What are minnows but brief flashes? And what are thoughts? And how do you capture a brief flash, even for a second?

~ Dinty W. Moore

The key to high concept is that fresh twist. Make it a big one. Wow your reader. Force her to gasp when she comes to that part in your story.

~ Darynda Jones

First drafts don’t have to be perfect. They just have to be written.

~ Anonymous

I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

~ Bill Bryson

A watched pot never boils. It's the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.

~ Christy Hall

Writing is about allowing yourself to become a vessel of creativity. Writers are avatars of creation. We have tender hearts, and strong emotions. It's hard not to when you have a million different people's personalities playing out in your head.

~ Sai Marie Johnson

One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damned thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?

~ Roger Ebert

Good writing just isn't that common.

~ Eric Flint

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

~ Neil Gaiman

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

~ Guy Kawasaki

An author needs a lot more than one person to succumb to his literary seductive charms, but, like Saul, he must realize that he doesn't have to--and indeed cannot--capture the hearts of every possible reader out there. No matter who the writer, his ideal intended audience is only a small faction of all the living readers. Name the most widely read authors you can think of--from Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens to Robert Waller, Stephen King, and J.K. Rowling--and the immense majority of book-buyers out there actively decline to read them.

~ Thomas Mccormack

Maybe those sailors will write bad poems, but the same men would have kept dull diaries, too. The problem has to do not with the evidence but with the witness. The point is not the adventure but the adventurer. Reality cannot be directly rendered. Reality is a pile of bricks that can assume many forms.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

~ Markus Zusak

Personally, I am always more impressed by simplicity, clarity; it is the mark of a writer who knows his subject well and is secure enough not to 'lay it on' in the telling. Aim for complexity of thought, not expression.

~ Noah Lukeman

I have an idea and a first line -- and that suggests the rest of it. I have little concept of what I’m going to say, or where it’s going. I have some idea of how long it’s going to be -- but not what will happen or what the themes will be. That’s the intrigue of doing it -- it’s a process of discovery. You get to discover what you’re going to say and what it’s going to mean.

~ T.c. Boyle

I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.

~ Donald Windham

I'm going to write a novel and get it published. I'm going to do it because writing a novel is worthwhile and because I have the talent to do it.I'm going to do it because I have something important to say to the world.I refuse to let anything get in my way.

~ Randy Ingermanson

She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

~ Bell Hooks

Without books, everything would have been crooked. Without books, the wisdom in books today would have been fairy and folk tales. Without books the whole truth about life would have been imaginations and a guessing game

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

However much or little I had written, on a subsequent reading it always seemed so fundamentally flawed that I had to destroy it immediately and begin again.

~ W.g. Sebald