Quotes about writing
page 11

“Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.”

Brian Keene (1967) American writer

“Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.”

Bret Easton Ellis (1964) American novelist

“I’m having a hard time writing about Sunday. Getting the long hollow feeling of Sundays. No mail and faraway lawn mowers, the hopelessness.”

Lucia Berlin (1936–2004) American writer

Source: A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories

Feeling, Time

“I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Source: The Writing Life

People, Books, Imagination, Reading

“There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets… when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.”

Charles Bukowski book Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Source: Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

Madeleine L'Engle book A Wrinkle in Time

Source: A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

“It's like you're a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, 'I'm sorry, but this role isn't right for me'. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: How They Met, and Other Stories

Life, Books

“What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

Life, Reality

“Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Letter to Arch Gerhart (29 January 1958), p. 106
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Source: The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Context: Events of the past two years have virtually decreed that I shall wrestle with the literary muse for the rest of my days. And so, having tasted the poverty of one end of the scale, I have no choice but to direct my energies toward the acquisition of fame and fortune. Frankly, I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left me.

“A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Reading, Country

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

Charles Bukowski book Women

Source: Women

People

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"Mr. Mailer Interviews Himself" in The New York Times Book Review (17 September 1965)

Men, Books

“All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven't the time to write, and all those who have the time don't live them! D'you see?”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Zorba the Greek

Source: Zorba the Greek

Life, Time

“They're just memories now. Time to write them off.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Memory, Time

“Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel.

That would fix a lot of people.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

People, Summer

“Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?”

James Agee book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Source: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

“I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

Failure

“To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Suicide

“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Books

“If you own this story you get to write the ending.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Attitude

“Someone once asked Somerset Maughham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. "I write only when inspiration strikes," he replied. "Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Source: http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/65-aug.htm Bob Dylan Interview

People

“I'm looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing -- writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that's like.”

Kathy Acker (1947–1997) American novelist, playwright, essayist, and poet

“The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

April 6, 1775
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II
Source: The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

Books, Time, Reading, Parting

“There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays”

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) American writer

Life

“Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

“i still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line…”

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) Japanese author

Way

“If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water's edge.”

Napoleon Hill (1883–1970) American author

Variant: If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it...

Water

“If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

Love, Books, Sleep, Reading

“Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that’s why they write symphonies..”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Death, People, History, Mathematics

“Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.”

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) New Zealand author

Journal entry (July 1922), published in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927)

Imagination

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Beauty, Sex, Feeling

“I’m not sure I’ll ever be finished. No matter how much I write, there will always be something I should’ve said.”

Megan McCafferty (1973) American novelist

Source: Fourth Comings

“God writes a lot of comedy, Donna; the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Happy to be Here (1983), p. 259
Source: Happy to Be Here

God

“Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

God

“Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?”

Kate DiCamillo book Because of Winn-Dixie

Source: Because of Winn-Dixie

Love, Books

“I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Feeling

“Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Reading

“I cannot write to anyone outside myself--if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That's the only person I'm trying to please.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Personality

“If your life is worth thinking about, it is worth writing about.”

Robin S. Sharma (1965) Canadian self help writer

Life, Thinking

“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”

Margaret Atwood (1939) Canadian writer

Waiting, Perfection

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

Women, Men, Hope, Art

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate, Pleasure, Sadness, Suffering

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Love

“He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.”

Don DeLillo (1936) American novelist, playwright and essayist

World, Way

“Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Pain, Way

“How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Music, Travel, Feeling, Kiss

“I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.”

Francois Mauriac (1885–1970) French author

“Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.”

Melinda Haynes (1955) American writer

Forgetting

“If our lives are truly "hid with Christ in God," the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write. What we are is going to be visible in our art, no matter how secular (on the surface) the subject may be.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Source: Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

God, Art, Christ

“Writing is a bit like being a god”

Charlie Higson (1958) British actor, writer and singer

God

“Planning to write is not writing. Outlining... researching... talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

The New York Times (20 October 1985)

“My letters are for when I don't want to be in love anymore. They're for good-bye. Because after I write in my letter, I'm not longer consumed by my all-consuming love… My letters set me free. Or at least they're supposed to.”

Jenny Han book To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Source: To All the Boys I've Loved Before

Love

“Cal: “Could you write a little bigger? I’m not sure China saw that.”
Every Boy's Got One”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

Boy

“Freedom is… the right to write the wrong words.”

Patti Smith (1946) American singer-songwriter, poet and visual artist

Freedom

“The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

Country

“I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Well of Ascension

“It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone — it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: It Chooses You

Love, Feeling, Time

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Variant: Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Water

“Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.”

Roland Barthes (1915–1980) French philosopher, critic and literary theorist

“‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.”

Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist

“Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Life

“Write something, even if it's just a suicide note.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Suicide

“I don't know what's wrong with me. It's like all I can do is keep writing this gibberish to keep from breaking apart.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Real web designers write code. Always have, always will.”

Jeffrey Zeldman (1955) Internet pioneer

“There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Women

“The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

Time, Reading

“Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.”

Washington Irving (1783–1859) writer, historian and diplomat from the United States

Source: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories

Understanding, Heart

“Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Life

“It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

1950-07-06
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000)
Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

People, Books

“Writing is the thing that props me up.”

Horton Foote (1916–2009) American playwright and screenwriter

“Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.”

Reinaldo Arenas (1943–1990) Cuban poet/novelist/playwright

Art, Literature, Thinking

“The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.”

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) French writer and film director

Source: Writing

Search, Solitude

“If we can't write diversity into sci-fi, then what's the point? You don't create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

World

“I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.”

Anne Rice The Wolf Gift

Source: The Wolf Gift

Thinking, Personality

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Way

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

Natalie Goldberg (1948) American writer

Source: Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within

Fear

“She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ‘til the day he dies. Not even then.”

Daniel Handler book The Basic Eight

Source: The Basic Eight

Love, Boy

“When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Variant: When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Songwriters write songs, but they really belong to the listener.”

Jimmy Buffett book A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Source: A Pirate Looks at Fifty

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) French philosopher

“My page was too white
My ink was too thin
The day wouldn't write
What the night pencilled in”

Leonard Cohen book Book of Longing

Source: Book of Longing

Night

“I was attempting to write the story of my life. It wasn't so much about plot. It was much more about character.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Life

“Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

Life, Drawing

“I’m asking the questions tonight.” One day I was going to write a book: How to Dictate to a Dictator
and Evade an Evader, subtitled How to Handle Jericho Barrons.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Bloodfever

Books, Question

“Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Love, Dreams, Reading

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Life, Soul, Sense, Reading

“I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Books

“I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

People, Books

“A book comes and says, 'Write me.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Books

“I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.”

Thomas Harris (1940) American author and screenwriter

“When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Painting

“Write about us,” Robinson urged. “Tell our story.” And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: First Love

“I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.”

Charles Bukowski book Love Is a Dog from Hell

Source: Love Is a Dog from Hell

Love

“A writer should read until he is filled to the brim and like a pitcher which is over-filled over flows. And then he should write.”

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) French author

Reading

“We don't usually write up accidents involving rabbits.
- Joe Morelli”

Janet Evanovich Hard Eight

Source: Hard Eight

“Fool," said my muse to me. "Look in thy heart and write.”

Philip Sidney book Astrophel and Stella

Sonnet 1,Concluding couplet from Loving in truth,and fain in verse my love to show
Compare: "Look, then, into thine heart and write", Henry W. Longfellow, Voices of the Night, Prelude.
Variant: Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.
Source: Astrophel and Stella (1591)
Context: .... But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Fools, Heart

Quotes about writing page 11

Quotes about writing
page 11