Writing Quotes

You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.

~ Jayce O'neal

I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane.

~ Jay-Z

Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.

~ Alberto Moravia

And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

~ Andre Dubus Iii

A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ...

~ C.j. Heck

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

~ Jeffrey Robinson

Too many irons, not enough fire.

~ S. Kelley Harrell

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

~ Lorrie Moore

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

~ Will Self

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

~ Socrates

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

~ Mary Gaitskill

Never put off writing until you are better at it.

~ Gary Henderson

When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

~ Hillary Frank

Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.

~ Walter Moers

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

~ Charlotte Brontë

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

~ Tom Robbins

It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise

~ John Cleese

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

~ G.k. Chesterton

Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go.

~ Ann Brashares

I'd write of people and places like I knew, and I'd make my characters talk everyday English; and I'd let the sun rise and set in the usual quiet way without much fuss over the fact. If I had to have villains at all, I'd give them a chance, Anne--I'd give them a chance. There are some terrible bad men the world, I suppose, but you'd have to go a long piece to find them...But most of us have got a little decency somewhere in us. Keep on writing, Anne.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

~ Roman Payne

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

~ Gary Shteyngart

I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed.

~ Bauvard

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

~ Elmore Leonard

Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.

~ Laurie Halse Anderson

A writing may be lost, a lie may be written, but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

~ Joseph Conrad

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

~ Jeanette Winterson

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

~ Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.

~ H. Jackson Brown Jr.

All novels are sequels, influence is bliss.

~ Michael Chabon

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.

~ Vita Sackville-West

No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

~ Stephen King

I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.

~ Jane Austen

When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.

~ Dennis Cooper

Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think university stifles writers. My opinion is that it doesn't stifle enough of them.

~ Flannery O'connor

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).

~ Roland Barthes

Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know.

~ Natalie Goldberg

Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.

~ Oscar Wilde