Writing Quotes

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

~ Fernando Pessoa

I cannot decide whether it is an illness or a sin, the need to write things down and fix the flowing world in one rigid form. Bear believed writing dulled the spirit, stilled some holy breath. Smothered it. Words, when they’ve been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they’ve passed, events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time. Writing a thing down fixes it in place as surely as a rattlesnake skin stripped from the meat and stretched and tacked to a barn wall. Every bit as stationary, and every bit as false to the original thing. Flat and still and harmless. Bear recognized that all writing memorializes a momentary line of thought as if it were final. But I was always word-smitten.

~ Charles Frazier

Most people keep their dreams to themselves, afraid to follow their hearts. Writers make their dreams a reality with each word, each line that flows from their pen.

~ C.k. Webb

I always tell my students, about the biggest baddest things in life you must try to write small and light, save the big writing for the unexpected tiny thing that always makes or breaks a story.

~ Pam Houston

You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.

~ Thulani Davis

How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'(Amber)'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'(Virgil Daly)

~ Christina Westover

Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.

~ David Markson

Shut up and write.

~ K.a. Laity

In the name of being social, we learn to ignore our natural instinct.Society keeps dictating do's and don'ts which we keep obeying day in and day out.

~ Chitralekha Paul

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

~ Gregory Maguire

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...

~ Jack Kerouac

I've met talespinners before, Jake, and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because they're afraid of life.

~ Stephen King

Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.

~ Julia Cameron

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

~ Samuel Johnson

It can be depressing when no one takes interest, and a lack of response makes the writer question why they’re writing at all. To have one’s writing rejected is like you, yourself, are being rejected.

~ Elizabeth Clements

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

~ Virginia Woolf

Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time -- life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.

~ Holly Lisle

...I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it again.

~ Flannery O'connor

Over the years I have forged intimate familial ties with these characters, who are reflections of a portion of myself. Consequently, even a character who appeared only once in a short story waits now in the wings, concealed by the curtain, for his next appearance on-stage. Not one of them has ever broken free of his familial ties with me and disappeared for ever - at least, not within the confines of my heart.

~ Shūsaku Endō

Do not put statements in the negative form.And don't start sentences with a conjunction.If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that agreat deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.De-accession euphemisms.If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

~ William Safire

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

~ Raymond Carver

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.

~ Roman Payne

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

~ Richard Hugo

Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they said...I'll stand up for you. You're not lone anymore.

~ Leon Uris

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

~ Julian Barnes

Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.

~ Jack Kerouac

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

~ Mignon Mclaughlin

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

~ Toni Morrison

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

~ Christina Baldwin

As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.

~ John Gardner

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

~ Julian Barnes

All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

~ Erica Jong

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

~ Eudora Welty

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

~ Eudora Welty

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

~ Julian Barnes

I'll use the blood from my spilling heart to write the words that were never able to slip out of my mouth, so you can see how much you've broken me into a perpetual state of melancholy.

~ Karen Quan

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

~ Tanith Lee