Writing - Quotes

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 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 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 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 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

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