Writing Quotes

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

~ Don Roff

Books choose their authors, the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

~ Salman Rushdie

What amazes me is that most days feel useless. I don't seem to accomplish anything-just a few pages, most of which don't seem very good. Yet, when I put all those wasted days together, I somehow end up with a book of which I'm very proud.

~ Louis Sachar

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

~ Joseph Campbell

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

~ Stephen King

She doesn't quite chop his head off.She makes a Pez dispenser out of him.

~ Frank Miller

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

~ Patti Smith

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

~ Elvis Costello

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.

~ Patrick Rothfuss

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God.

~ Nancy M. Malone

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

~ Thomas Harris

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

~ Stephen King

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

~ Anne Lamott

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.

~ Aaron Sorkin

In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a).

~ John Scalzi

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.

~ Patricia Duncker

No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness.

~ Edwidge Danticat

I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.

~ Beth Revis

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much worse.

~ Quentin R. Bufogle

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

~ Dave Barry

A novel rough draft is like bread dough, you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

~ Chris Baty

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

~ May Sarton

Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.

~ Laura Kasischke

All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.

~ Umberto Eco

It is dark. You cannot see. Only the hint of stars out the broken window. And a voice as old as the Snake from the Garden whispers, 'I will hold your hand.

~ John Wick

The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated dose of life. I said, almost indignantly, That's the danger of it, it prepares you to live, but at the same time, it exposes you to disappointments because it gives a heightened concept of living, it leaves out the dull or stagnant moments. You, in your books, also have a heightened rhythm, and a sequence of events so packed with excitement that I expected all your life to be delirious, intoxicated.Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm. Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day. And between writers there is a straining after extravagance. We incite each other to jazz-up our rhythm.

~ Anaïs Nin

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present. Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet. I tease the class, Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.

~ Natalie Goldberg

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

~ Thomas Pynchon

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.

~ Dan Simmons

The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.

~ Anne Lamott

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes, unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

~ Will Self

A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

~ Charles Péguy

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.

~ Philip Roth

Jane's stories are too sensible. Then Diana puts too much murders into hers. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them. -Anne Shirley

~ L.m. Montgomery

Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed.

~ Patrick H.t. Doyle

If you wish to be a writer, write.

~ Epictetus

Almost anyone can be an author, the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

~ A.a. Milne