Writing Quotes

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

~ Jennifer Lanthier

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

~ John L'heureux

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

~ Graham Greene

Never give your opinion on someone's writing unless they ask sincerely, and never ask for someone's opinion unless you're sincere.

~ Justin Alcala

The end is everything.

~ Arthur K. Flam

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

~ Lera Auerbach

Remember: Writing is drawing.

~ Danny Gregory

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

~ Colum Mccann

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The infant New York Times boasted that no newspaper printing what was really worth reading ever perished for lack of readers.

~ Harold Holzer

Writing is the painting of the voice.

~ Voltaire

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

~ Roland Barthes

...what really makes for readability is not clarity but attitude: the attitude of your prose toward out elusive friend the Reader and the role you invent for that invented being in your invented world.

~ Stephen Koch

The story I'm writing finds its own voice while I'm writing it.

~ Holly Lisle

To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” —Allen Ginsberg, WD

~ Jodi Woody

Moreover it is easier, in the informality of conversation, to achieve that excitement and incoherence which is the true eloquence of love.

~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

Your narrative may fail to grip if you haven't taken any care to find out how well or badly your audience member is faring (or feeling).

~ Christopher Hitchens

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.

~ Sara Sheridan

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

~ Joss Whedon

I tend to like strong female characters. It just interests me dramatically. A strong male character isn't interesting because it has been done and it's so cliched. A weak male character is interesting: somebody else hasn't done it a hundred times. A strong female character is still interesting to me because it hasn't been done all that much, finding the balance of femininity and strength.[From a 1986 Fangoria interview]

~ James Cameron

Every novel is an attempt to capture time, to weave something solid out of air. The author knows it is an impossible task - that is why he keeps on trying.

~ David Beaty

I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

~ Teju Cole

I keep being told that my writing is getting better and better. - Now, at first I am thrilled by that, but then I think, Isn't everybody's? Do some authors grow cozy with their own style, and stay there?I think of writing fiction as an art form. As such, it's a constant exploration of new and developing ideas. If any of my books were much like my others, I don't think I'd even bother to write them.

~ Edward Fahey

Nonfiction at its best is like fashioning a cabinet. It can never be a sculpture. It can be elegant and very beautiful, but it can never be sculpture. Captive to facts - or predetermined form - it cannot fly.

~ Peter Matthiessen

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

~ Will Self

Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.

~ Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Her face was as red as her hair. “What are you doing,” she cried. Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. “Editing your paper.” What did it look like he was doing?“You’re just cutting out stuff!”“What do you think editing is?

~ M.m. John

In this place called Hell novels are written by people who don't read books.

~ Andy Seven

I think novelists are in the education business, really, but they're not teaching you times tables, they are teaching you responsiveness and morality and to make nuanced judgments. And really to just make the planet look a bit richer when you go out into the street.

~ Martin Amis

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

~ Ralph Ellison

...you mean you don't fit characters into a plot? excatly...

~ John Geddes

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor.

~ Coleman Dowell

It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

~ Katie Roiphe

Writing is my passion. It’s in my blood like a talent is. Like dancing, or singing, or drawing, I write. I can never stop writing. It helps me to express everything I’m afraid to talk about out loud when I need to say it the most. It’s my pacifier in a way...

~ Melissa C. Hamilton

A childhood filled with adventures, happiness and unabated love.If only I could remember ...

~ Lynda Fisher

I keep six honest serving men. (They taught me all I know) Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

~ Rudyard Kipling

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

~ Nancy Banks-Smith

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody but one whom nobody can imitate.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

~ Barbara G. Harris