Writing Quotes

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

~ Stephen King

great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.

~ Charles Bukowski

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

~ Lady Gaga

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

~ Cornelia Funke

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

~ Ray Bradbury

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

~ William Faulkner

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

~ Ishmael Reed

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

~ Virginia Woolf

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

~ Stephen King

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

~ Anthony Burgess

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

~ Isaac Asimov

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

~ Joss Whedon

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

~ Sylvia Plath

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever.[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

~ Toni Morrison

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility, that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

~ Harlan Ellison

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

~ Louisa May Alcott

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

~ Stephen King

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

~ Nora Roberts

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

~ Jennifer Weiner

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

~ Anne Lamott

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

~ Franz Kafka

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

~ J.d. Salinger

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

~ Vladimir Nabokov

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

~ Sidney Sheldon

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

~ Alice Walker

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

~ Voltaire

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic, it is not for everybody, it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

~ Flannery O'connor

It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

A book is a suicide postponed.

~ Emil M. Cioran

My books are water, those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

~ Mark Twain

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

~ Virginia Woolf