Quotes about writing

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“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

“Writing is the act of discovery.”

“If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”

“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

“When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”

“Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.”

“Writing is not some quiet, closet act.”

“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”

“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”

“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”

“Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.”

“They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.”

“The process of writing is a little like madness, a kind of possession not altogether benign.”

“Every Messiah fails, writes Litvak, the moment he tries to redeem himself”

“Behind every specific call, whether it is to teach or preach or write or encourage or comfort, there is a deeper call that gives shape to the first: the call to give ourselves away - the call to die.”

“How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous.”

“… at last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had.”

“What a lot we lost when we stopped writing letters. You can't reread a phone call.”

“There’s a big difference between death threats and love letters–even if the person writing the death threats still claims to actually love you. Of course, considering I once tried to kill someone I loved, maybe I had no right to judge.”

“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.”

“When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.”

“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does”

“I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.”

“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”

“Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.”

“bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it”

“Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation — the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.”

“If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.”

“You fail only if you stop writing.”

“I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.”

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

“But our wounds are part of who we are… and there is nothing left to chance…. And pain's the pen that writes the songs…. That call us forth to dance”

“For me, the first sign of oncoming madness is that I'm unable to write.”

“I begin with writing the first
sentence—and trusting to Almighty
God for the second.”

“Writers have to keep on writing if they want to mature, like caterpillars endlessly chewing on leaves.”

“People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.”

“You learned to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.”

“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.”

“Let us love nobly, and live, and add again
Years and years unto years, till we attain
To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.”

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

“Don't you like to write letters? I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.”

“She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

“…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…”

“Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.”

“It's much more entertaining to live books than to write them.”

“A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.”

“I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

“Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

“The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here.”

“To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.”

“The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.”

“A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.”

“Who here wants to be a writer?' I asked. Everyone in the room raised his hand. 'Why the hell aren't you home writing?' I said, and left the stage.”

“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”

“Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.”

“Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!”

“So long as you write it away regularly nothing can really hurt you.”

“writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all”

“Writing, at its heart, is a solitary pursuit, designed to make people depressoids, drug addicts, misanthropes, and antisocial weirdos.”

“If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.”

“She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.”

“I write out of revenge.”

“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.”

“Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind---vividly, forcefully…”

“The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have… excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.”

“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”

“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”

“I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.”

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.”

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

“I was twenty then. What the hell, I used to say, take your time, Bandini. You got ten years to write a book, so take it easy, get out and learn about life, walk the streets. That’s your trouble: your ignorance of life.”

“If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.”

“I want to write my life. I want to be able to write my life.

You are a second away from saying it.


You have no idea how much I love you.”

“I didn’t write that song to try and win you over, or to steal you away from him. I wrote it because I knew I never could.”

“I need to write. It keeps me focused for long enough to complete thoughts. To let each train of thought run to its conclusion and let a new one begin. It keeps me thinking. I’m afraid that if I stop writing I’ll stop thinking and start feeling.”

“The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.”

“and then there are some who
believe that old
relationships can be
revived and made new
again.

but please
if you feel that way

don't phone
don't write
don't arrive”

“To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart - this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.”

“Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.”

“If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.”

“If he wrote it, he could get rid of it. He had gotten rid of many things by writing them.”

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”

“You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”

“I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry… I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.”

“Most rats read. Our frustration is, we cannot hold a pen to write.”

“Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.”

“I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

“A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.”

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.”

“Writing is a deeper sleep than death.
Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave,
I can't be dragged from my desk at night.”

“It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.”

“I think, writing-wise, I am probably more of a quilter than a weaver because I just get a little scrap here and a little scrap there and sew them together.”

“I have people in my life, of course. Some write; some don't. Some read; some don't. Some stare vacantly into space when I talk the geeky talk and walk the geeky walk, but they make killer chocolate chip pancakes and so all is forgiven.”

“I write for love, but love doesn’t pay the bills.”

“Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.”