Writing Quotes

I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.

~ James Tagg

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

~ Ray Bradbury

When we write with power and authenticity, it opens the door to our hearts and invites others in. When we're brave, we make others brave. Brave is good.

~ Lynda Cheldelin Fell

We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. No right on red is a rule. Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly is an observation.

~ Howard Mittelmark

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

~ Elmore Leonard

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to Black Spring.3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure

~ Henry Miller

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

~ George Orwell

The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.

~ Gwenda Bond

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike.

~ Haruki Murakami

A runner's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time. It's the same for a writer ...

~ C.j. Heck

To find new, keep moving forward ...

~ Nanette L. Avery

If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it.

~ T.a. Uner

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

~ Eudora Welty

Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer.

~ Pittacus Lore

Every reader wants the same thing: to open the cover of a book and watch the words explode like fireworks off the page.

~ Kim Lehman

You enter a book as if you are setting out on a journey and, if it is a good book, you will be a different person when you reach the end.

~ Chloe Thurlow

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

~ Charles Frazier

A book lives a new life every time it is read.

~ Brandon Sanderson

I guess you can call me old fashioned. I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.

~ Felicia Johnson

Some days I feel more like a scribe than a creator. I will have the major points fleshed out, but there is always a turn or two that I didn't see coming, or which came earlier than I expected it to, or not at all...

~ J. Neven-Pugh

For (Levi) Grossman, no books feel more like home than C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which provide the template for what he likes to read—and how he wants to write.

~ Joe Fassler

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

~ Walter Kirn

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

As a writer, self-doubt is useless. Get rid of it, rip it out like a weed and compost it.

~ Julie Rodelli

Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.

~ Sarah Colliver

If rejections were cash, I'd be rich

~ Buffy Andrews

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.

~ Bohumil Hrabal

Prose before hoes, muthafucka! I’ll be right over.

~ David Louden

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could’ve been good. There’s an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter how skilful you are...

~ Joss Whedon

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!

~ Lewis Carroll

Author branding is the process of positioning an author as the center of attraction and influence, to be the preferred choice in a given theme, style, category, niche or genre

~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho

~ Blaise Pascal

There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman.

~ Alexander Ferrick

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

~ Ben Yagoda

It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.

~ A.j. Liebling

Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

~ Anita Diamant

Upon descending our threaded words on the web by a steep and hazardous precipice of readers requires constant review.

~ Msconcerned

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.

~ Sidney Zion

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

~ Susan Sontag

An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana