Writing Quotes

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

~ William Faulkner

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

~ Ray Bradbury

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

~ Oscar Wilde

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

~ Stephen King

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

~ Anton Chekhov

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

~ Aldous Huxley

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

~ Frank Herbert

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

~ Stephen King

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

~ Philip Pullman

The first draft of anything is shit.

~ Ernest Hemingway

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

~ Thomas Mann

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

~ Charles Dickens

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

~ Stephen King

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

~ Sylvia Plath

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

~ William Wordsworth

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

~ Franz Kafka

A word after a word after a word is power.

~ Margaret Atwood

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

~ Annie Proulx

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

~ Caroline Gordon

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

~ Philip José Farmer

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

~ Jack London

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

~ Stephen King

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.

~ William H. Gass

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

~ Lorrie Moore

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

~ Joss Whedon

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

~ Albert Camus

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

~ Toni Morrison

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

~ Stephen King

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

~ Mark Twain

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called leaves) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

~ Carl Sagan

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

~ Stephen King

Write what should not be forgotten.

~ Isabel Allende

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

~ Kingsley Amis

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...

~ Brandon Sanderson

You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.

~ Ellen Degeneres

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

~ Stephen King

I hate writing, I love having written.

~ Dorothy Parker

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

~ Pablo Picasso

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. (1980)]

~ Carl Sagan