Writing Quotes

Writing is like life: it goes on.

~ Marty Rubin

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing... I am a recording instrument... I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”... Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function... I am not an entertainer...

~ William S. Burroughs

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

~ Tiffany Madison

Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.

~ Pascal Quignard

To be a successful fiction writer you have to write well, write a lot … and let ‘em know you’ve written it! Then rinse and repeat.

~ Gerard De Marigny

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

~ John Steinbeck

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

~ Vincent H. O'neil

It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.

~ L.m. Montgomery

Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.

~ Linda Nelson

But that initial, comet-blazing-across-the-sky, Big Idea is only the beginning. Each book is composed of a mosaic of thousands of little ideas, ideas that invariably come to me at two in the morning when my alarm is set for seven.

~ Lauren Willig

Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.

~ Manuel Rivas

As for writing, that's a cruel hard business. Unless you're very lucky it'll break your heart.

~ Edward Abbey

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

~ Annie Dillard

Novel writing is like heroin addiction it takes everything you've got.

~ James N. Frey

I think it should be done over, Buddy. …Please make peace with your wit. It's not going to go away, Buddy. To dump it on your own advice would be as bad and unnatural as dumping your adjectives and your adverbs because Prof. B. wants you to. What does he know about it? What do you really know about your own wit?I've been sitting here tearing up notes to you. I keep starting to say things like 'This one is wonderfully constructed,' and 'The conversation between the two cops is terrific.' So I'm hedging. I'm not sure why. I started to get a little nervous right after you began to read. It sounded like the beginning of something your arch-enemy Bob B. calls a rattling good story. Don't you think he would call this a step in the right direction? Doesn't that worry you? Even what is funny about the woman on the back of the truck doesn't sound like something you think is funny. It sounds much more like something that you think is universally considered funny. I feel gypped. Does that make you mad? You can say our relatedness spoils my judgement. It worries me enough. But I'm also just a reader. Are you a writer or just a writer of rattling good stories. I mind getting a rattling good story from you.

~ J.d. Salinger

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

~ Geoff Dyer

Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.

~ Isabel Allende

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

~ Vincent H. O'neil

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

~ Mary Pipher

but when i write, i feel like the most important man in the world, because when i write, i give meaning to things. i create significance, and i create meanings, and as hard as that may for you to believe, that's really even more important in the long run than life and death.

~ Elliot Mabeuse

A place that proves if you get enough talented people in a room, one or two are bound to offer some helpful advice. Kind if like monkeys with typewriters.

~ A. Lee Martinez

Write until your fingers break. It may be the cure for everything.

~ Kelly O'connor Mcnees

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

If your business plan depends on suddenly being discovered by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.

~ Hugh Macleod

He showed, in a few words, that it is not sufficient to throw together a few incidents that are to be met with in every romance, and that to dazzle the spectator the thought should be new, without being farfetched; frequently sublime, but always natural; the author should have a thorough knowledge of the human heart and make it speak properly; he should be a complete poet, without showing an affectation of it in any of the characters of his piece; he should be a perfect master of his language, speak it with all its pruity and with the utmost harmony, and yet so as not to make the sense a slave to the rhyme. Whoever, added he, neglects any one of these rules, though he may write two or three tragedies with tolerable success, will never be reckoned in the number of good authors.

~ Voltaire

There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.

~ E.t.a. Hoffmann

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.

~ Joan Didion

The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop.

~ L.m. Montgomery

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

~ Umberto Eco

My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart...

~ Haruki Murakami

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide-- a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted on to take one somewhere.

~ Rebecca Solnit

One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.

~ Mirra Ginsburg

You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things. Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. How, though? Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

~ Markus Zusak

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination.

~ Christina Westover

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

~ Henry Adams

Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.(Literature, Revolution, and Entropy)

~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

I live entire lifetimes in my head. Sometimes simultaneously.

~ Cypher Lx

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

~ Haruki Murakami

Writing is the voices inside our heads, our minds, the creativity that exists for us to, from nothing, create alternate worlds, manipulate a personality or to introduce a new kind of love, a new kind of hate or pain or happiness or wonder or... anything we want. Through words, we can do, we can be anything we want.

~ Allie Burke