Quotes about writing
page 9

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

Stephen King book The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Source: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Love

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

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

Reading

“Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

Reading

“It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.”

Khaled Hosseini (1965) novelist

“But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?"
Yes… the same age you will be if you don't.”

Julia Cameron book The Artist's Way

Source: The Artist's Way

Age, Learning, Time, Painting

“I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.”

William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American poet

Disease, Thinking

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Source: Diaries of Franz Kafka

People, Sister, Personality

“For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes - not that you won or lost -
But HOW you played the Game.

"Alumnus Football”

Grantland Rice (1880–1954) American sportswriter

Game, Football

“Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Cousin‟s Wife.
Moses must have forgotten to write that one down”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: When He Was Wicked

“If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills you.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

“Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Source: Mansfield Park

“To write requires an ego, a belief that what you say matters. Writing also requires an aching curiosity leading you to discover, uncover, what is gnawing at your bones.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Love, Making love

“I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Life, Music, Parting

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”

Dodie Smith book I Capture the Castle

Source: I Capture the Castle

“write what readers want to read, which isn’t necessarily what you want to write.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

Reading

“Sometimes the biggest disasters aren’t noticed at all—no one’s around to write horror stories.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 33 (p. 443).

“That's what it feels like when I write, like I have this beautiful world in my head, but when I try to remember it in order to write it down, I change it, and I can't ever get it back.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

World, Beauty, Feeling, Change

“Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

Love, Dreams, Future

“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”

Meg Cabot (1967) Novelist

People, Reading

“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Star, Solitude, Reading

“When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

Sue Monk Kidd (1948) Novelist

Source: The Invention of Wings

Books

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Source: Living Out Loud

Life, Search, Change, Reading

“It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Life

“Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

Learning, Science

“Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself… It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.”

Harper Lee (1926–2016) American author

“It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.”

Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

Life, Thinking

“I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Source: Girl, Interrupted

World, Way, Thinking

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

Rebecca Solnit book The Faraway Nearby

Source: The Faraway Nearby

“It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Way, Feeling

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

Zadie Smith (1975) British writer

Life

“One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Source: The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs

Despair

“Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.”

Hélène Cixous (1937) French philosopher and writer

Source: Coming to Writing and Other Essays

Life

“Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Books, Reading

“Don't punish yourself,' she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Variant: ... there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
Source: The Book Thief

Pain, Happiness

“I knew it, I just knew it! The person who had the job of writing my life's dialogue used to work on a very low budget soap opera.”

Marian Keyes (1963) Irish writer

Source: Watermelon

Life, Personality

“Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Reading

“The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything. There would only be what is.”

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

Source: The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9

Truth

“What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe”

James Dickey (1923–1997) American writer

Love, God, Nature, Universe

“I dedicate this novel to Gala, who was constantly by my side while I was writing it, who was the good fairy of my equilibrium, who banished the salamanders of my doubts and strengthened the lions of certainties…”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Hidden Faces

“When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Age, Moms, Reading

“Yeah, I know what your English Professor tried to tell you. But if your English Professor could make a living writing fiction, they would have been doing it.”

Dean Wesley Smith (1950) science fiction author

“If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire is not to write”

Hugh Prather (1938–2010) American writer

Source: Notes to Myself

“Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?”

Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet

Secret

“It's four in the morning, the end of december
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

“If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework — you can still be writing, because you have that space.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

New York Times (27 July 1980)

Cars, Silence

“Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.”

Stephen King book Just After Sunset

Source: Just After Sunset

Cry

“not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

Samuel Johnson London

A Review http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/jenyns.html of Soame Jenyns' A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil, published in the first volume of Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces (London, 1774), p. 23

Life

“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Source: What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Thinking

“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

“Ragnor's important business was probably getting together to write a burn book with Raphael. Magnus could see them now, sharing a bench and scribbling happily away about Magnus's stupid hair.”

Cassandra Clare The Bane Chronicles

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Books, Stupidity, Business

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.”

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism

Source: An Essay on Criticism (1711)

Art, Chance, Dance

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

Juan Ramón Jimenéz (1881–1958) Spanish poet

As quoted in the epigraph in Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury; Susie Salmon also uses this quote in The Lovely Bones, and Daniel Quinn published a book in 2007 with the title If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways (2007)
Spanish: "Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado" (If they give you lined paper, write on the other side)
"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way" is often attributed to William Carlos Williams who was contemporary with JRJ.
Misattributed

Way

“If I made a joke about just dropping in, would you write me off as a cliche?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Jace to Clary, pg. 338
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Ashes (2008)

“To memorize something, it's best to write it down.”

Koushun Takami book Battle Royale

Source: Battle Royale

“I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Locked Rooms and Open Doors (1974)

Thinking

“Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Preface to Dr. Brodie's Report [El informe de Brodie] (1970)

Dreams

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Singing, Cry

“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and again and again. My life story was spaces.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Life

“Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.”

Andrew Lang (1844–1912) Scots poet, novelist and literary critic

Source: Adventures Among Books

Men, People, Books, Reading

“I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Parting

“She gave her a reason to write her own words, to see that words had also brought her to life.
"Don't punish yourself," she heard her say again, but there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Life, Pain, Happiness

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”

Eudora Welty (1909–2001) American author

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

People, Time