Writing Quotes

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.

~ Cyril Connolly

History never repeats itself, historians do.

~ Lee Benson

Life is a sea of vibrant color. Jump in.

~ A.d. Posey

I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.

~ Felisberto Hernández

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

~ Italo Calvino

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

~ Joseph Brodsky

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

~ Stephen King

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

~ Roman Payne

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn't mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It's a good calling, then, to speak a better story. How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder. How grateful we are to hear these stories, and how happy it makes us to repeat them.

~ Donald Miller

As Mo had said: writing stories is a kind of magic, too.

~ Cornelia Funke

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, What happened to your hand? And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

~ Tom Waits

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

~ Junot Díaz

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

~ Nelson Algren

I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.

~ Laura Anne Gilman

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

~ Marie Brennan

Fiction is true. It doesn’t have to factual to be true.

~ Ben Monopoli

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?

~ Annie Dillard

There's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting--not least of which the fact the phrase standard fantasy setting can be uttered without irony.

~ Yahtzee Croshaw

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

~ Mark Vonnegut

The key to good writing is to leave Boo Radley in the house until the end of the story.

~ Michael P. Naughton

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake.

~ W.h. Auden

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

~ Mark Twain

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame, there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money....

~ Thomas Bernhard

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.

~ Italo Calvino

It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.

~ Edna O'brien

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

~ Ray Bradbury

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

~ Mickey Spillane

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

~ Stephen King

I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

~ Aldous Huxley

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sesungguhnya, penulis yang bersemangat jauh lebih menjanjikan daripada penulis yang berbakat.

~ Mohammad Fauzil Adhim

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

~ Tobias Wolff

He found solace in what he wrote. It was an attempt to discover who he was at the moment.

~ Brian Krans

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

~ Vladimir Mayakovsky

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

~ Hélène Cixous

When I work, I'm just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that's not familiar. But I'm not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.

~ Don Delillo

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer wants to be harm.

~ Ezra Pound

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind, the writing will demand it of you.

~ Natalie Goldberg

I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips.

~ Christopher Vogler

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

~ Stephen King