Writing Quotes

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

~ Washington Irving

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.

~ Helen Keller

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

~ Doris Lessing

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

I tell aspiring writers that you have to find what you MUST write. When you find it, you will know, because the subject matter won’t let you go. It’s not enough to write simply because you think it would be neat to be published. You have to be compelled to write. If you’re not, nothing else that you do matters.

~ Rick Riordan

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

~ Steven Pressfield

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they don't have time to read. This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons.

~ Stephen King

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

~ Flannery O'connor

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

~ Fernando Pessoa

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

~ Neil Gaiman

Science fiction is not prescriptive, it is descriptive.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings.

~ Denis Diderot

A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most kick-ass form. It's a potent force that, when wielded with respect, will level any obstacle in its path. This is especially true when it comes to creative pursuits.

~ Chris Baty

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

~ Graham Greene

You’re a mess, I confess, I despise you in the best kind of way.

~ Coco J. Ginger

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why wouldn't it be? All important things are hard.

~ Toni Morrison

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

~ Philip Pullman

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

~ Alexander Trocchi

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?

~ Stephen King

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

~ Paul Rudnick

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language, it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said, what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

~ Italo Calvino

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message.

~ Stephen King

All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.

~ Jimi Hendrix

I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn't have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn't that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write?

~ Ann Patchett

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

~ Shannon Hale

Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.

~ L.m. Montgomery

if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

~ Paulo Coelho

Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

~ Mel Brooks

Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

~ Joseph Campbell

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

~ John Steinbeck

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write

~ George Sand

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

~ Virginia Woolf

Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing.

~ William Faulkner

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

~ Virginia Woolf

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

~ Samuel Johnson

Realism can break a writer's heart.

~ Salman Rushdie