Quotes about writing

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“Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.”

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

“Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.”

“My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.”

“Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.”

“I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.”

“Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”

“The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden; what is forbidden is to write about it.”

“It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.”

“When I got older I decided I wanted to be a real writer. I tried to write about real things. I wanted to describe the world, because to live in an undescribed world was too lonely.”

“Don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?”

“I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.”

“Adventure is just a romantic name for trouble. It sounds swell when you write about it, but it's hell when you meet it face to face in a dark and lonely place.”

“There have been none like us before. And there will be none afterwards. Be careful what you write.”

“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”

“Some people have written that my writing has helped them go on.
It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.”

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.”

“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”

“Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.”

“A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.”

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. The writer's job is to turn the unspeakable into words - not just into any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.”

“Write about what you're afraid of.”

“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

“I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.”

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

“Meddling, smug, stupid little…"
"She likes me! They always play hard to get when they like me!"
"No. You do not understand. I could not have done it because I can not read or write.”

“It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.”

“Someone has to write all those stories: why not me?”

“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”

“I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.”

“People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.”

“My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.”

“The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.”

“All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.”

“Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.”

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”

“If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.”

“I went to college, but I learned to write by reading and writing.”

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

“The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything.”

“I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”

“To experience real agony is something hard to write about, impossible to understand while it grips you; you're frightened out of your wits, can’t sit still, move, or even go decently insane.”

“If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.”

“You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.”

“Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.”

“It is a melancholy illusion of those who write books and articles that the printed word survives. Alas, it rarely does.”

“What's the best part about writing a book?
Finishing it.”

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

“My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.”

“I write to understand as much as to be understood.”

“The challenge is to write about real things magically.”

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”

“No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about… One thing's for sure—no one but you can be the hero of your story.”

“Shaw… has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.”

“He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, for that is what he will know.”

“Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written.”

“No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

“Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.”

“What you write chooses you.”

“If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!”

“I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.”

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”

“It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.”

“Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say.
Of course those who write short books have even less to say.”

“Health makes good propaganda. “'Proof' that women's activities outside the home are detrimental to the health and welfare of themselves, their families and the country as a whole” lent impetus, writes Ann Oakley, to the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. The ovaries were seen as collective property rather than the woman's own business, as the face and body outline are seen today. Who can argue with health?”

“I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.”

“What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.”

“Nobody cares much whether you write or not. You just have to do it”

“Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't…. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

“If I write something, I fear it will happen, and if I love too much, I fear I will lose that person; nevertheless, I cannot stop writing or loving…”

“My style of writing is very diffrent from yours.”

“The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

“When one is writing a letter, he should think that the recipient will make it into a hanging scroll.”

“Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the kind a soul needs.”

“Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.”

“I don't remember Moses writing, 'Thou shalt not kill.. unless you think you have a good reason.”

“We may talk a good game and write even better ones, but we never outgrow those small wounded things we were when we were five and six and seven.”

“There are many reasons why novelists write but they all have one thing in common a need to create an alternative world.”

“Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.”

“If you write a line of zeroes, it´s still nothing.”

“But you hate poetry!
Yes, but you make me want to write it.”

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”

“The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.”

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.”

“I unfolded the note, and it took me a few seconds to decipher Adrian’s writing. If he did write me a dating proposal, I really hoped he would type it.”

“Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.”

“There's the life you live and the life you leave behind. but what you share with someone else - especially someone you love - that's not just how you bury your past. It's how you write you future.”

“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”

“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”

“I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning.”

“Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.”

“… writing is not a performance but a generosity.”

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Writing is prayer.”

“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.”