Writing Quotes

If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.

~ R.a. Salvatore

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

~ Eudora Welty

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I am the perfect version of me.

~ Besa Kosova

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel....Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

~ Diane Setterfield

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

~ Alexandra Fuller

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant.

~ Tara Bray Smith

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.

~ Roald Dahl

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I'm not being clear, exactly, but don't you kind of feel what I'm feeling?

~ George Saunders

Iniisip ni Lucas kung gaano kalaki ang kapangyarihan ng isang writer. Sa pamamagitan ng mga salita ay kaya niyang patigilin ang dyip, ilabas ang lihim ng mga pasahero, pabuhusin ang ulan upang linisin ang mga basura sa palibot, ikulong ang mga opisyal na corrupt at tuluyang i-delete sa bansa ang kahirapan.

~ Ricky Lee

...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

...(W)here there's drama, there's crap.

~ Jincy Willett

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as Thank God its Friday (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive its (no apostrophe) with the contractive it's (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian kill response in the average stickler.

~ Lynne Truss

If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit.

~ Robert Mckee

Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.

~ Margaret Atwood

The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.

~ Seamus Heaney

Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.

~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky.

~ Haruki Murakami

The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them.

~ Tahereh Mafi

When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception.

~ Zadie Smith

He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan.

~ Dashiell Hammett

To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue.

~ Jennifer Salaiz

Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth.

~ Lori Lansens

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.

~ Norman Mailer

Menulis kembali kenangan masa lalu butuh sebuah keberanian.

~ Iwan Setyawan

You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.

~ Dave Eggers

Writing well means never having to say, I guess you had to be there.

~ Jef Mallett

I wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite.

~ Besa Kosova

Personally, I think so-called common language is more interesting and apropos than proper English; it's passionate and powerful in ways that wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow just isn't.

~ J.r. Ward

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.

~ Anne Lamott

I felt like poisoning a monk.

~ Umberto Eco

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

~ Umberto Eco

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

~ Jack Kerouac

it's good for you to write down your thoughts. It'stherapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think aboutlife.

~ Katie Kacvinsky

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

~ Sandra Brown

Menjadi penulis adalah sebuah perjalanan panjang, yang tidak selalu diisi oleh hal-hal yang menyenangkan. Akan selalu ada kritik, akan selalu ada komentar negatif, akan selalu ada kesalahan. Yang terpenting adalah kita belajar dari kesalahan-kesalahan tersebut dan bangkit untuk menggapai mimpi kita.

~ Winna Efendi

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

~ Lemony Snicket

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay