About Writing Quotes

The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.... Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.

The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer.

Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait.

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

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.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

You can only write by putting words on a paper one at a time.

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

I write to believe in goodness.

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

Speed is not always a constituent to great work, the process of creation should be given time and thought.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

When writers stop believing in their own stories, readers tend to sense it.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.

Where do storytellers find the wisdom to discover their own stories? From no place more mysterious than their own hearts.

We need to boost each other to get to the top. It is much more effective than stepping on each other.

I just write whenever I can.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

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

All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

Only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story. . . . Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91)

Love is one of those topics that plenty of people try to write about but not enough try to do.

I finished the [blog] post reflecting on the fact that, despite all the changes in my life, maybe I wasn't so different after all. If I typed it, maybe I could believe it, too.

To conquer fear, you must become fear.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

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

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

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.

There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.