Writing Quotes

I'm not a big fan of inspiration. I'm too old to sit and wait for the muse to give me a little kiss... I write a lot, and I'm not afraid to make mistakes or to write badly. I can alsways fix something weak and dull. But I can't fix a blank page.

~ Ron Koertge

File under Hard Truths: the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.

~ Antony Johnston

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?~Jack or The Submission

~ Eugène Ionesco

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.

~ Tom Robbins

To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real.

~ Augusto Roa Bastos

This recognition of the truth we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give a writer by nodding our heads and observing, “Yes, yes, very good, very true—that’s just what I’m always saying.” I mean the recognition of a truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withint our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it's because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course. Writers want to be special, because they're so not. They're losers, overgrown kids who've never escaped from being misfits and who have run away into their own imaginations in an attempt to find self-esteem. Why do you think they all star in their own books? Self included.

~ Chancery Stone

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

~ Natalie Goldberg

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

~ Iain Banks

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

~ Beth Kephart

Rahasiaku produktif menulis? Hanya satu kata: NIAT.

~ Primadonna Angela

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

~ Haruki Murakami

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

~ Janet Frame

Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth

~ L.m. Montgomery

The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths, wind would sweep away obtuse padding.

~ Gretel Ehrlich

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

~ Stephanie Lennox

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

~ Laura Goode

A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed like no one listened to them. You write poetry books that maybe 50 people read. And you just keep doing your work because you have to, because it’s your calling.But it’s beautiful to be embraced by the people.Some people have said to me, “Well, don’t you think that kind of success spoils one as an artist? If you’re a punk rocker, you don’t want to have a hit record…”And I say to them, “Fuck you!” One does their work for the people. And the more people you can touch, the more wonderful it is. You don’t do your work and say, “I only want the cool people to read it.” You want everyone to be transported, or hopefully inspired by it.When I was really young, William Burroughs told me, “Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises. Don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful. Be concerned with doing good work. And make the right choices and protect your work. And if you can build a good name, eventually that name will be its own currency.

~ Patti Smith

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.

~ Tennessee Williams

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

~ James Russell Lowell

...it is precisely because the world appears to us to be multiple, ambiguous, and paradoxical, that we must strive to speak and write clearly.

~ Mark Dintenfass

Treat your relationship with your writing as an important one. Seperti hubungan kamu dengan pacar, teman-teman dan keluarga. Temukan komitmen untuk terus berjalan maju, dan tentukan target untuk tulisanmu (secara waktu, juga secara kualitas), lalu terapkan disiplin untuk mencapai deadline.

~ Winna Efendi

Perhaps writing a story or a novel was not something that should be done for money, or to win praise, but for the sheer sensual pleasure of it. I liked that idea. It made me want to write lots of stories, to give myself that pleasure.

~ Vanessa Wu

It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.

~ Michelle Richmond

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

~ Nadine Gordimer

not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.

~ Charles Bukowski

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

~ David Gerrold

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

~ Edward Abbey

Writing is such an industry now. In many ways, that's a good thing, in that it removes all the muse-like mystique and makes it a plain old job, accessible to everyone. But with industry comes jargon. I was aware that jargon was starting to fill those growing shelves of Writer's Self Help books, not to mention the blogosphere. Wherever I looked, the writing of a script was being reduced to A, B, C plots, Text and Subtext, Three Act Structure and blah, blah, blah. And I'd think, that's not what writing is! Writing's inside your head! It's thinking! It's every hour of the day, every day of your life, a constant storm of pictures and voices and sometimes, if you're very, very lucky, insight.

~ Russell T. Davies

Only a generation of readers will span a generation of writers.

~ Steven Spielberg

...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?

~ Lloyd Alexander

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

~ Virginia Woolf

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

~ Ezra Pound

A book is kind of like a good Horcrux, if we can imagine that -- a piece of the writer's soul, preserved in a physical object for all time, and changing the lives of all those who come in contact with it.

~ Cheryl B. Klein

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.

~ Aberjhani

...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.

~ Elizabeth Goudge