Writing Quotes

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

~ Dave Eggers

To write a novel, you need an iron butt.

~ Richard M. Nixon

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

~ Robert Bringhurst

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

~ Catherine Drinker Bowen

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

~ Julio Cortázar

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washèd it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

~ Edmund Spenser

My writing is how I maintain.

~ Mark Salzman

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

~ Anna Quindlen

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

~ Maynard James Keenan

Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water, it spreads through and colors everything.

~ Lisa Cron

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

~ David Foster Wallace

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

~ Dorothy L. Sayers

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

~ Richard P. Denney

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

~ Kate Mosse

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

~ Neil Gaiman

I'm a drinker with writing problems.

~ Brendan Behan

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.

~ Julia Cameron

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

~ Frances Mayes

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

~ Sandra Brown

Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn to the standby anthologies of poetry to satisfy that itch for music, for perfection and economy of phrasing, for exactness of tone. Then, too, I want a book so filled with story and character that I read page after page without thinking of food or drink because a writer has possessed me, crazed with an unappeasable thirst to know what happens next.

~ Pat Conroy

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

~ Marge Piercy

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

~ Sharon M. Draper

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.

~ Fran Lebowitz

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Arrogance kills creativity.

~ A.m. Riley

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

~ Hilaire Belloc

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

~ Alberto Manguel

You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.

~ Sarah Gilbert

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.

~ Louise Desalvo

To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.

~ Dana Stabenow

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

~ Miguel Syjuco

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

~ Umberto Eco

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

~ Walter De La Mare

Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.

~ C.k. Webb

I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.

~ Arthur Holitscher

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

~ Katherine Anne Porter

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

~ Alice Walker

Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?

~ Gustave Flaubert