Writing Quotes

The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.

~ Bret Easton Ellis

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say: 'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

~ Anton Chekhov

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

~ Charles Bukowski

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

~ Tom Stoppard

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature.

~ William Shakespeare

Writing is the best anti-depressant.

~ Fierce Dolan

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

~ Stephen King

A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.

~ Charles Bukowski

Sometimes I scare myself at how easily I slip inside my mind and live vicariously through these characters.

~ Teresa Mummert

Art is the overflow of emotion into action.

~ Brian Raif

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out?

~ J.d. Salinger

Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

~ Veronica Roth

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

~ John Lanchester

Write a little. Read a little. Dick around on the internet. Post something to Pinterest or Facebook. Text a friend. Write some more. Curse it because it's shit. Write some more. Repeat.

~ Katrina Monroe

It turns out that the distance from head to hand, from wafting butterfly to entomological specimen, is achieved through regular, disciplined practice. What begins as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out.

~ Ann Patchett

The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.

~ Charles Bukowski

It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It's in my blood, as magic is in yours. His mouth is still smiling, but his tone is somber. I couldn't stop writing even if I wanted to.

~ Elora Bishop

Dip your hands into life, scoop up memories, dreams, questions and ideas and weave them into stories.

~ Naomi Kinsman

Words are one of the most powerful things given to human beings. In the hands of artists who can use them properly they are like weapons of mass construction.

~ Eric T. Benoit

I say fuck the old advice 'show, don't tell.' It's called story TELLING for a reason, and I'll stick to it!

~ Ashly Lorenzana

I am, apparently, of that rare breed that likes to write. The demands of a chapter pull me from bed in the morning, and regardless of how well I think I know the day's road ahead, there are always surprises. But the pleasures that come from writing about the American past, of discovering what I hope no one has seen before, are of course balanced by rough, often tedious stretches. Writing does not come easily for me; I work slowly, much like a sculptor with a chisel, only words rather than stone or wood are my medium. But when at the end of the day I have a page or two that seem right, I pull away from the desk certain that all is right in the world, regardless of what the evening news might tell me later.

~ David Freeman Hawke

Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.

~ Jessica Lave

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

~ Piers Anthony

Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.

~ P.d. James

They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.

~ Elizabeth Hardwick

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

~ Umberto Eco

Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.

~ Anne Lamott

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me.

~ Coco J. Ginger

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

~ Stephen King

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

~ Theodora Goss

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

~ Jeanette Winterson

We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

~ L.l. Barkat

And middle-class women, although taught to value established forms, are in the same position as the working class: neither can use established forms to express what the forms were never intended to express (and may very well operate to conceal).

~ Joanna Russ

[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.

~ G.k. Chesterton

(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. (The Adoration of The Magi)

~ W.b. Yeats