Writing Quotes

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

~ Alexandre Dumas

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

~ Ian Mcewan

the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever

~ Charles Bukowski

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

~ George R.r. Martin

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...

~ Eudora Welty

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

~ Natalie Goldberg

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

~ Richard Bach

Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

~ Joss Whedon

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

~ Mario Vargas Llosa

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

~ Gustave Flaubert

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

~ David Sedaris

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

~ Coco J. Ginger

I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.

~ Roxane Gay

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

~ Charles Baxter

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.

~ Isaac Asimov

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

~ Anaïs Nin

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

~ Anne Lamott

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

~ Muriel Barbery

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

~ Oscar Wilde

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

~ Haruki Murakami

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

~ C.s. Lewis

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

~ Salman Rushdie

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

~ Abigail Adams

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

~ Tim O'brien

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

~ Octavia E. Butler

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

~ John Waters

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

~ Ian Mcewan

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

~ Hunter S. Thompson

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.

~ Toni Morrison

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

~ Flannery O'connor

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

~ Austin Kleon

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

~ Samuel Johnson

Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

~ Stephen King

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.

~ Elmore Leonard

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

~ Arthur Rimbaud

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

~ John Kennedy Toole

All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.

~ Margaret Atwood

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

~ Carlos Fuentes