Writers / Writing - Quotes

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. - Aldous Huxley

A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught. - William Butler Yeats

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. - Saul Bellow

A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment. - William Shenstone

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. - Richard Bach

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. - Charles Peguv

A Writer... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. - John dos Passos

A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill. - Ernest Hemingway

A writer is a reader moved to emulation. - Saul Bellow

A writer only becomes a true writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a great artist may experiment with clay or oils until the medium becomes second nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire. - Christabel Lamotte

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? - Saul Bellow

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. - Leo Rosten

A writer’s duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can. - Debasish Mridha

A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do. - Andy Rooney

All adventure stories need antagonists to challenge the heroes. These can be natural enemies – sea storms, breaking dams, great white sharks – human enemies, or both. To add as much excitement as possible, you need to show why these opponents are so dangerous. - Tish Farrell

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. - Ernest Hemingway

All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. - Steve Almond

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas. - Robert Frost

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best. - Amos Bronson Alcott

And by the way, everything in life is writeable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. - Sylvia Plath

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labour, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. - Ray Bradbury

Any writer who would make the most of [the challenge] must meet it well equipped, trained, prepared – not necessarily with exactly the same understandings and opinions as his fellows, or with identical skills, but with his own natural abilities and aptitudes developed to their optimum (something that is very largely up to him) – and this applies not only to the new and unpublished writer but to each of us who looks out on the world as it is and the universe as we are finding it to be and sets his or her mind to adventuring among the dangers and difficulties and strangenesses we know or suspect are there. - Reginald Bretnor

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write. - John Dos Passos

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready-made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail. - Aristotle

At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it – it will haunt you till it’s written. - Truman Capote

Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it – that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. - Philip Roth

Better one line that will survive the author than a hundred books outlived. - Unknown

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. - Cyril Connolly

Brevity is the sister of talent. - Anton Chekhov

Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better. - John le Carre

Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living – something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm. - Henri-Frederic Amiel

Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself – the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. - Yevgeny Zamyatin

Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. - Jack London

Each book starts from ashes. - Philip Roth

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. - Socrates

Even the best writer has to erase. - Spanish

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished. - William Wordsworth

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped. - Jeanette Winterson

Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel. - Austin O’Malley

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. - Philip Roth

Everybody wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else really thinks or wants. - Stan Lee

Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before. - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch. - Hans Christian Andersen

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through. - Markus Zusak

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it. - Hunter S. Thompson

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life. - Martin Amis

Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure. - Eudora Welty

Fiction – at least for me – requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity. - Samuel R. Delany

Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a laboured style. - William Shenstone

First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. - Octavia E. Butler

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it. - Ursula K. le Guin

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. - Ernest Hemingway

For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. - Dan Simmons

Get an agent. Seriously, submitting stuff unagented means it will end up on the slush pile. An agent is the first quality filter, and a good agent is worth his or her weight in gold, as they'll often know the editors on a personal level and will be able to talk to them directly about the project. - Tim Lebbon

Go to any lengths to avoid preachiness! If you have to choose between the message and the story, always choose the story. - Elizabeth Zelvin

Good fiction creates its own reality. - Nora Roberts

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. - Edward Albee

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. - E. L. Doctorow

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous. - William Somerset Maugham

Hate the autocracy of the kept gates all you like, but the forge of rejection purifies us (provided it doesn't burn us down to a fluffy pile of cinder). The writer learns so much from rejection about himself, his work, the market, the business. Even authors who choose to self-publish should, from time to time, submit themselves to the scraping talons and biting beaks of the raptors of rejection. Writers who have never experienced rejection are no different than children who get awards for everything they do: they have already found themselves tap-dancing at the top of the "I'm-So-Special" mountain, never having to climb through snow and karate chop leopards to get there. - Chuck WendigI must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living. - Anne Lindbergh

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. - Kurt Vonnegut

Here’s a slightly outrageous tip: Don’t respect the text. Just because you’ve written something down doesn’t mean it has a right to exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you can’t find a better way, and the passage really isn’t good, junk it. - Crawford Kilian

Here's a news flash – writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types like me are driven by one impulse – to make up a world in which we get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty, has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone else happy. - Victoria Laurie

How one writes is a bit of a mystery to oneself. You just do it. My experience is that I sit down and write and I make it sound right to me, or sound good or interesting. And that's it. - Adam Phillips

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to. - Jeff Abott

I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials. - Washington Irving

I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession.... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. And I didn't question if I should – I just kept sharpening the pencils! - Mary Oliver

I do everything they tell you not to. I go back and fix things as I go, otherwise I can't move forward. I don't write every day, I write in binges. I don't write drafts, what I write, fixed as I go, is pretty much what gets published. Everybody writes differently, and there are a lot of people who want everybody to write in the same way, people who have a lot invested in telling people to write a whole crappy first draft and then revise it, and so on. That absolutely doesn't work for me. I tell people there are things they can try, and things that might help, but there aren't any rules, except to do what works for you, what gets the story on the page. - Jo Walton

I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them any more. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do. - Charles de Lint

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow. - Kirby Larson

I just go to that same daydream-spot inside my head that I'm pretty sure all of us have. I don't know if people who don't write for a living actually meet strangers there, but I do, on a regular basis, and I absolutely insist they arrive with a good problem and tell me about it. There are particularly good spots for productive encounters: there's a beach I imagine and if I sit long enough and stare down the length of it, I'm sure someone will come walking down it, and most of them are interesting when they arrive. Sometimes I don't write all I meet, but most of the ones I meet do have interesting backgrounds. And sometimes I find I'm not on that beach at all, but in some space station corridor or in some castle hallway. Once these strangers tell me a little about their worlds I can make up the rest, out of smidges of geology, geography, history, archaeology, and snippets of whole cloth, and once I know their history and their quirks, I can most often figure out the rest of the story. Translation: thinking up new ideas and characters isn't hard. Writing day and night for months ... that's hard. - C. J. Cherryh

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere. - Cormac McCarthy

I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much. - Harper Lee

I never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write, you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent, the editor edit, the publisher publish. - Nora Roberts

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. - John Green

I think any start has to be a false start because really there's no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it's really a false start is when you start ... it's hard to put into words. - Elif Batuman

I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are. - Markus Zusak

I want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when you want to forget the world around you. The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment. - Jeff Abbott

I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books. - Louisa May Alcott

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I will write my way into another life. - Ann Patchett

Ideas are infinite – writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those keys. - Nora Roberts

If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one. - Christian Nestell Bovee

If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking. - Cormac McCarthy

If there's a book you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison

If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. - Somerset Maugham

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. - Stephen King

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you. - Alan Lightman

If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. - Robert Southey

If you write a page a day, you will be an author of a thick book in a year. Great results will take shape when small efforts are continually put in over time. - Unknown

If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader. - Stan Lee

If, while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of reality. - Gao XingJian

I'm all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters. - David Gerrold

I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them. - Julie Andrews

In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world. - Orson Scott Card

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused. - Ernest Hemingway

In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity. - Julian Barnes

In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer. - Christian Nestell Bovee

In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it. - Tobias Wolfe

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream. - Doris Lessing

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. - John Steinbeck

In writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together. - Susan Glaspell

In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. - Catherine Drinker Bowen

It is usual that the moment you write for publication – I mean one of course – one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness. - John Steinbeck

It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way. - Ernest Hemingway

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. - Elizabeth Strout

It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? - Kelly Link

Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today – all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about where publishing is going – and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success. - Jeff Abbott

Learn to write well, or not to write at all. - John Dryden

Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told. - Walter Mosley

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give. - China Mieville

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. - George Bernard Shaw

My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. - Elmore Leonard

No music. No rituals. At home I write in my office or on the laptop in the kitchen where our puppy likes to sleep, and I love his company. But I've trained myself to be able to work anywhere, and I write on trains, planes, in automobiles (if I'm not the driver), airports, hotel rooms. I travel often. If I couldn't write wherever I was I would get little done. I also can write in short bursts. Fifteen minutes are enough to move a story forward. - Gail Carson Levine

No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling. - Eleanor Roosevelt

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. - Henry David Thoreau

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped. - Lillian Hellman

Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolours. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. - Joan Didion

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. - William Strunk

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. - Ernest Hemingway

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines. - Emile Zola

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. - Annie Dillard

One of the most interesting parts of writing is that you can think about it all of the time. Writers get their ideas all day and all night long, not just when they sit at their writing tables. No one will see your thoughts, but inside you head you can always wonder and ponder. “Hmmm… that’s strange.” Or, “I might write about that later.” When you write, you notice things that other people do not. Artists and scientists do this too. To create, one must observe. - Edgardo H. Pangilinan

Only a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers. - Steven Spielberg

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion. - Dan Simmons

Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting. - Jeff Abbott

Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage. - Octavia E. Butler

Remember that in today's market, distribution and promotion are as important as craft. But don't forget what made you want to write fiction. If it was for the money, you're in the wrong business! - Elizabeth Zelvin

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft. - Tobsha Learner

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible. - Ray Bradbury

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. - Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it. - Harold Acton

Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck. - Bob Lonsberry

Start writing a new chapter, for if you live by the book you’ll never make history. - Ben Sobel

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he adds, but by what he takes away. - Charles Caleb Colton

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium. - Norbet Platt

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind. - George Henry Lewes

The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don’t whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. - E.A. Bucchianeri

The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history. - John Dos Passos

The chief advantage that ancient writers can boast over modern ones, seems owing to simplicity. Every noble truth and sentiment was expressed by the former in the natural manner; in word and phrase, simple, perspicuous, and incapable of improvement. What then remained for later writers but affectation, witticism, and conceit? - William Shenstone

The factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky. - Samuel R. Delany

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned. - Anais Nin

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about – these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time. - Eudora Welty

The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. - Anne Lamott

The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book. - Mickey Spillane

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis. - William Styron

The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is. - Sam Shepard

The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. - Lawrence Block

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. - Luigi Pirandello

The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself. - Gail Carson Levine

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity – but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. - Yevgeny Zamyatin

The pen is mightier than the sword. - Edward Bulwer Lytton

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them. - Eugene Ionesco

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things. - Chris Abani

The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you. - Robert Stone

The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. - Walter Mosley

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination. - James A. Michener

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything. - Walter Bagehot

The right story needs the right telling. - John Green

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. - Anaïs Nin

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. - Anais Nin

The same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading. - Jean de la Bruyere

The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way. - Richard Harding Davis

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. - Charles de Lint

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers. - Iain M. Banks

The waste basket is the writer's best friend. - Isaac Singer

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time  you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. - John Irving

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. - Julian Barnes

There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living – cook books and detective stories. - Rex Stout

There are two kinds of writers; those that make you think, and those that make you wonder. - Brian Aldiss

There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word – tension – has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end – is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be? - John Jeremiah Sullivan

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily. - Anthony Trollope

There would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing. - Markus Zusak

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair. - Huraki Murakami

Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if they are not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them. - Saul Bellow

To finish is sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done. - John Steinbeck

To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible. - Ursula K. le Guin

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. - Herman Melville

To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up. - V. S. Naipaul

To write simply is as difficult as to be good. - William Somerset Maugham

To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself. - Anne Rice

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. - Virginia Woolf

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. - Charles Colton 

Trouble not thyself about the fate of thy writings: if what thou hast writ be worth preserving, no flood, however mighty, can sweep it away; if it be worthless, no ink, however prepared, can make it indelible. - Ivan Panin

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn'd to dance. - Alexander Pope

Two sorts of writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. - Anne Lamott

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. - Ray bradbury

Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work. - Ernest Hemingway

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer. - Ursula K. le Guin

Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past – it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases. - John Ashbery

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. - Thomas Wolfe

What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book. - Katy Lederer

What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information. - Robert Stone

When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too. - Stephen King

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time."  - Stephen King

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery. - Jane Hirshfield

When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one. Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all these places than here. - Tanith Lee

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing. - Enrique Jardiel Poncela

When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research. - Wilson Mizner

Without a pen in my hand I can't think. - John le Carre

Write a wise saying and your name will live forever. - Unknown

Write and share your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people. - Lailah Gifty Akita

Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble. - Ben Franklin

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. - Howard Nemerov

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. - Stephen King

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. - Glen Cook

Writers are made – forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities. - Chuck Wendig

Writer's block is only a failure of the ego. - Norman Mailer

Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default. - John Barth

Writers kid themselves – about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work – there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes – it's still just work. - Sinclair Lewis

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders. - Walter Bagehot

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind. - Edmund Burke

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories. - Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing a killer first line to a novel is an art form in which there are a few masters and a great many apprentices. - Chuck Wendig

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship. - Anne Lamott

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. - Sharon O'Brien

Writing can't be a way of life – the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. - Doris Lessing

Writing in the first person can be claustrophobic – everything that happens in the book is notionally filtered through the narrator, and one can long for the fresh air of another perspective. One can luxuriate in the peculiar world of a character, but there are limitations. Ironizing that person's experience is difficult. You need perhaps a candid old friend of the narrator who can tell a few truths the narrator prefers to ignore. - Alan Hollinghurst

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. - Don Delilllo

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted. - Gerald Asher

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. - Graham Greene

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. - Ann Patchett

Writing is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the experience. - C. J. Cherryh

Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words. - Charles Simic

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall. - Kate Braverman

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. - John Le Carré

Writing is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it. - John Green

Writing is the dancing of words, sometimes it is beautiful and meaningful, sometimes it is not. - Debasish Mridha

Writing is the supreme solace. - William Somerset Maugham

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.... The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That's what keeps me going on those dark December days. - John Banville

Writing the first chapter can feel like you're trying to artificially inseminate a stampeding mastodon with one hand duct taped to your leg. That's okay. That's normal. Do it and get through it. - Chuck Wendig

Writing when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation. - Laurence Sterne

You become a serious novelist by living long enough. - Don Deilillo

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. - Doris Lessing

You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence. - Katherine Anne Porter

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It's just so easy to give up! - Octavia E. Butler

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas. - Tobias Wolff

You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes. - Anne Lamott

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist. - Isaac Asimov

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write. - Saul Bellow

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed. - Anita Brookner

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a labourer or as an artist. - Anne Lamott

You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you're the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway. - Chuck Wendig

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. - Meg Rosoff