Writing Quotes

I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Professional writers don't have muses, they have mortgages.

~ Larry Kahaner

Failing to writer everyday doesn't mean that you've given up, though a chapter a day - keeps writers block away!

~ David Batterson

To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

~ Ruth Rendell

... in art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

~ Noël Coward

All raw, uncooked, protesting.(on Aldous Huxley)

~ Virginia Woolf

I am too much of an imitator to be a true writer.

~ Zia Haider Rahman

There's writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

~ Judith Briles

It is, of course, not only impossible for readers to know the intention of most, if not all, writers, but an author himself may think he is writing one thing while he is in fact writing something quite different.

~ Russell M. Goldfarb

The big trinity of publishing: mystery, thrillers and romance. If you can combine all three, then it’s a winner’s trifecta and you’ll be rich beyond your dreams.

~ Dermot Davis

A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn, it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.

~ Charles Brower

What do you want to write? What gets your goat? What irks you to no length? If you could change the world with words, what would they be?

~ Lori Lesko

Hard core authors are determined about their craft, and they know that building a brand entails hard work. They eat, breathe and live their writing.:

~ Geraldine Solon

This is the best time to be an author.

~ Geraldine Solon

Be the CEO of your own career.

~ Julie Hedlund

An Authorpreneur focuses on establishing one's brand to the consumer using different avenues to promote their work.

~ Geraldine Solon

Author? Author? Did you write these legs?''Yes.'Well, I don't like dem. I don't like 'em at all at all. I could ha' writted better legs meself.

~ Spike Milligan

An idea is a gift, a finished project is turning that gift into a book by making yourself write even when you don't want to. There is no such thing as a block of time to write. You have to carve time from a busy day. Elaine L. Orr

~ Elaine Orr

Most gothics are overplotted novels whose success or failure hinges on the author's ability to make you believe in the characters and partake of the mood.

~ Stephen King

Let your passion bleed through your work. No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

~ Ace Antonio Hall

I read your diary. I KNOW

~ Mary Papas

Writer's block is when your imaginary friends won't talk to you.

~ Mary Papas

That woman must have been a husky in a previous life.

~ Mary Papas

There's a darkness to everyone, you just have to let it out to see the world in new eyes.

~ Jesse Abundis

All that sweetness makes me feel weird. My sister was never the loving type.

~ Mary Papas

- If you could describe my son in 3 words, what would you say? - Sweet. Cute. Funny. - That could be a description of a puppy she says dryly.

~ Mary Papas

A shrink and a patient in a love-hate relationship. Who is REALLY the boss?

~ Mary Papas

...he was after all, a novelist...and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.

~ Stephen King

There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.

~ Carol Morgan

Authors are merely the medium between the words and the page.

~ Caron Kamps Widden

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.

~ Rachel Hartman

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

~ John Green

Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you're just ready to get that baby out!

~ Carmen Desousa

i want to never settle for anything less than my soul on paper.

~ Jonathan Culver

i want to bleed ink and shit prose.

~ Jonathan Culver

We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.

~ G.m.w. Wemyss

We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

~ Teresa Mummert

Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it evident that you posted what was 'good enough for government work,' don't try and fake it. Give it your best, your all, not for pence, but for the love of the craft. Do these things, as these writers and scores I have not named do, bring to your work your self, your heart, your voice, motherly or youthful, lawyerly or priestly, conservative or liberal, it matters not. Do this and I and hundreds of others will return again and again to your work, not merely because we may have a burning need for a new printer or an abiding interest in college newspapers or what have you, but because we wish to spend time with your mind and voice.

~ Markham Shaw Pyle

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I’ve heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures’ myths, and maybe that was true. I don’t know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don’t have enough myths of our own, we’ll latch onto those of others — even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it’s human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight.

~ N.k. Jemisin