Writing Quotes

Fiction---good fiction, anyway---is dream made flesh, given purpose and drive, and set on a quest to show us the best in us and to give us the power and the tools to dream beyond reality's 'merely good enough' to a vision of what is truly great......and then to give us the stories of men and women of character who in turn inspire those of us who dare to reach for the truly great within ourselves.THAT is why you write fiction.

~ Holly Lisle

He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. (Out Back)

~ Garry Douglas Kilworth

Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.

~ Ngaio Marsh

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

~ Theodora Goss

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

~ Jack London

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

~ Ngaio Marsh

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

~ Grace Bridges

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

~ Victor J. Banis

Writing is one of the ways I participate in transformation.

~ Toni Cade Bambara

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

~ Franz Kafka

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

~ Neil Gaiman

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And we all, every single one of us, no matter who we are and no matter what’s been taken from us or what poison we’ve internalized or how hard we’ve had to work to expel it –– we all get to dream.

~ N.k. Jemisin

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

~ Nikki Giovanni

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Writing is the great invention of the world.

~ Abraham Lincoln

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

~ R.j. Dennis

I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.

~ Lydia Davis

When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for comber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That's because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I'm sure it's around here somewhere.)

~ John Varley

What is the essence of the art of writing? Part One: Have something to say. Part Two: Say it well.

~ Edward Abbey

When a character comes to life, it’s like meeting a new friend for the first time.

~ Lynette Mather

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

~ Aberjhani

Writing a story, regardless of length, begins always with a single word.

~ Don Roff

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

~ Katherine Paterson

Certainly, I want to capture the reader's attention from the beginning and hold it until the end: that is half the purpose of my art. The other half must be to tell my story in the most honest way that I can.

~ Edward Abbey

Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father's library.

~ Michael Chabon

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

~ William Meikle

One Lifetime is not enough.

~ Maurice Northmore

Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers.

~ Brenda Ueland

Never let negativity derail your journey as a writer. Use the energy for your own betterment.

~ Guadalupe Neri

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.

~ Umberto Eco

[R]eality and real people are too subtle and complicated for anybody's typewriter, even Tolstoy's, even yours, even mine.

~ Edward Abbey

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

~ Stephen King

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

~ Irwin Shaw

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

~ James Joyce

I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing what you really felt, rather that what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things which produced the emotion that you experienced...

~ Ernest Hemingway

I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Follow the rules until you make them.

~ Luke Green

STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book?RICHIE:I did decide to write about what i experienced in climbing to the top. And finally when I got there, I discovered what was at the top.You know what was there?STRAUSS: No, I don't.RICHIE: Nothing. Not one thing. What was at the top was all the experiences that you had to get there.

~ Neil Strauss

Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.

~ Margaret Jean Langstaff