Writing Quotes

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

~ John Steinbeck

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

~ China Miéville

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

~ Erica Jong

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

~ Robert Benchley

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

~ Lois Mcmaster Bujold

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

~ Isaac Babel

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

~ Adrienne Rich

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

~ Flannery O'connor

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

~ Neil Gaiman

To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

~ Lillian Cauldwell

The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.

~ William Faulkner

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly.

~ Stephen King

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

~ André Breton

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

~ Mark Twain

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

~ Jodi Picoult

If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.

~ Bernard Knox

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

~ Jean Cocteau

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

~ Horacio Quiroga

There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.

~ Alex De Campi

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

~ Mary Oliver

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

~ Jessica Mitford

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

~ Lauren Groff

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

~ Fran Lebowitz

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

~ Frederik Pohl

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

~ Diane Duane

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

~ Craig Ferguson

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

~ Dave Barry

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

~ Steven Millhauser

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

~ Franz Kafka

Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.

~ Joseph Bruchac

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

~ Umberto Eco

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

~ Truman Capote

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

~ Winston S. Churchill

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

~ James N. Frey

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

~ The Script

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

~ Lyndsay Faye

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

~ Umberto Eco

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

~ Julio Cortázar

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

~ Julian Barnes