Writing Quotes
42 quotes
"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."
"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar."
"Write what should not be forgotten."
"I hate writing, I love having written."
"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."
"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words."
"I bleed ink for her, because her name is written on my heart. She’s the author of all the love I have to give."
"If you’re going to hang around and watch me write, you might as well have a noose around your neck. Would you mind if I kicked the chair out from under your feet? You’re standing on my only place to sit."
"I think I’m mouth blind and that’s why all food tastes bland. The only things that have any flavor are the words I love you."
"I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."
"My hands could be considered deadly weapons. You see, I write with both of them."
"I know the X’s and O’s of football. I just don’t know the other 24 letters. And as a writer, this bothers me."
"Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch."
"If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings."
"Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library."
"Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."
"Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion."
"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."
"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."
"In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a)."
"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."
"You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more."("The Castle")"
"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 hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."
"The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't."
"I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion."
"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"
"Because even among contrarians, I’m a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do I really mean when I say we want to shock society into awareness? Do we mean we want more originality and individuality? Less TV, more reading, writing, actual thinking? Less sheep, more shepherd pie? Yes, yes, and a little more pie, please. Oh, and some more sweet tea, too"
"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."
"I’m up for the Julius Caesar Author of the Year Award this year. I’m tremendously proud, considering Caesar is the guy who burned down the Library of Alexandria."
"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it."
"Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right."
"If the story you're telling, is the story you're telling, you're in deep shit."
"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]"
"I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM."
"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"
"Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them."
"New Year - a new chapter, new verse, or just the same old story ? Ultimately we write it. The choice is ours."
"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."
"I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?"I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to live! My writing is an overflow of the wine glass of my life, not a basin in which I wash out my ideals and expectations."
"Too many irons, not enough fire."
"The best writing speaks when the heart whispers."