Writing Quotes

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

~ Patricia Hampl

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

~ Stephen King

Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it.

~ Margaret Mahy

‎If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer’s life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

~ Stephen King

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

~ Dorothy Allison

Writing is a mysterious activity.

~ Susan Sontag

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.]

~ Ray Bradbury

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]

~ Vita Sackville-West

...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. It resembled the movements of a fly that had fallen into an ink-pot, and subsequently taken a little brisk exercise on a sheet of foolscap by way of restoring the circulation.

~ P.g. Wodehouse

Someone once asked me what I thought horror fiction did. What its purpose was . . . I replied that when I wrote horror fiction, I tried to take the improbable, the unimaginable, and the impossible, and make it seem not only possible--but inevitable.

~ Michael Mcdowell

10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

~ Brian Clark

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

~ Anthony Burgess

When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

~ Hilaire Belloc

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?

~ David Mamet

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

~ Joseph Conrad

Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it.

~ Stephanie Connolly

Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.

~ Pierre Abélard

I could not think without writing.

~ Jean Piaget

Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walking the streets, traveling to see a friend; and life does not stop while he remembers. Analysis in movement. No static vivisection. Henry's daily and continuous flow of life, his sexual activity, his talks with everyone, his cafe life, his conversations with people in the street, which I once considered an interruption to writing, I now believe to be a quality which distinguishes him from other writers. He never writes in cold blood: he is always writing in white heat.It is what I do with the journal, carrying it everywhere, writing on cafe tables while waiting for a friend, on the train, on the bus, in waiting rooms at the station, while my hair is washed, at the Sorbonne when the lectures get tedious, on journeys, trips, almost while people are talking.It is while cooking, gardening, walking, or love-making that I remember my childhood, and not while reading Freud's 'Preface to a Little Girl's Journal.

~ Anaïs Nin

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

~ Jules Renard

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

~ Anne Fadiman

Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin.

~ Natalie Goldberg

Everything in life is a story just waiting to be written.

~ M.g. Marsh

For me, I think it was a little easier to write thinking that nobody was listening.

~ Dan Kennedy

All the time she writing the world had continued.

~ Virginia Woolf

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

~ George Pelecanos

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

~ Geoff Ryman

People who understand everything get no stories.

~ Bertolt Brecht

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

~ William Faulkner

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

~ Francis Bacon

If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words...

~ David Foster Wallace

It is no worse, because I write of it. It would be no better, if I stopped my most unwilling hand. Nothing can undo it; nothing can make it otherwise than as it was.

~ Charles Dickens

Next morning I went over to Paul’s for coffee and told him I had finished. “Good for you,” he said without looking up. “Start the next one today.

~ Steven Pressfield

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

~ J.r. Ward

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

~ Nick Hornby

He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.

~ Henry Miller

In a way, I was safe writing

~ Franz Kafka

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

~ Dorianne Laux

Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.

~ Leonora Carrington