Writing Quotes

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

~ François-René De Chateaubriand

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

~ Joanna Russ

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

~ Dashiell Hammett

It would have been better to do what everyone else does, neither taking life too seriously nor seeing it as merely grotesque, choosing a profession and practicing it, grabbing one's share of the common cake, eating it and saying, It's delicious! rather than following the gloomy path that I have trodden all alone; then I wouldn’t be here writing this, or at least it would have been a different story. The further I proceed with it, the more confused it seems even to me, like hazy prospects seen from too far away, since everything passes, even the memory of our most scalding tears and our heartiest laughter; our eyes soon dry, our mouths resume their habitual shape; the only memory that remains to me is that of a long tedious time that lasted for several winters, spent in yawning and wishing I were dead

~ Gustave Flaubert

You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something.

~ H.l. Mencken

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

~ Jacques Barzun

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.When my father died, on the plane from his funeral in the UK back to New York, still in shock, I got out my notebook and wrote a script. It was a good place to go, the place that script was, and I went there so deeply and so far that when we landed Maddy had to tap me on the arm to remind me that I had to get off the plane now. (She says I looked up at her, puzzled, and said But I want to find out what happens next.) It was where I went and what I did to cope, and I was amazed, some weeks later when I pulled out that notebook to start typing, to find that I'd written pretty much the entire script in that six hour journey.

~ Neil Gaiman

You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm? I said. To myself.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

Inspirations never go in for long engagements, they demand immediate marriage to action.

~ Brendan Francis Brown

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

~ Thomas Pynchon

Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman.

~ Frank Miller

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

~ Terry Pratchett

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.

~ Neil Gaiman

I writeNotFor the sake of gloryNot For the sake of fameNotFor the sake of successBut for the sake of my soul

~ Beth Nimmo

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

~ E.l. Doctorow

I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion.

~ Elizabeth Reyes

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

~ Ezra Pound

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

~ Marcel Proust

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.)

~ Neil Gaiman

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

~ Anne Lamott

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

~ Jincy Willett

This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.I send you...A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.

~ S.a.r.k.

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

~ Junot Díaz

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again...

~ Hunter S. Thompson

The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector's item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That is why the writer is the loneliest man in the world; because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone; all his roles are played behind a curtain. In life he is an incongruous figure.

~ Anaïs Nin

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Dalam mengarang saya tidak pernah tergesa-gesa. Saya anggap pekerjaan mengarang adalah tugas yang santai, yang harus dikerjakan dengan senang hati. Kalau saya menulisnya dengan terburu-buru, berarti dengan hati yang kesal, maka dapat dipastikan bahwa si pembaca pun akan merasakannya.

~ Nh. Dini

Create a guidebook of creative dreamsYou can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others.

~ S.a.r.k.

I think, because…well, I like the idea of coming up with a story that never existed before, but I don’t really want to be in charge. I don’t want to be famous. I guess I like the idea of sitting in the dark and knowing that I created the thing on screen, that it’s my story, but, like, no-one else has to know it was me. Does that make sense?

~ Melissa Keil

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.

~ Virginia Woolf

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

~ Baltasar Gracián

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

~ Elie Wiesel

A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

~ Alice Steinbach

Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.

~ Jyrki Vainonen

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

~ Anne Lamott