About Writing Quotes

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

My pen shall heal, not hurt.

A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

Read – and be curious. And if somebody says to you: 'Things are this way. You can't change it' - don't believe a word.

If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion

There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.

I just want my stories to be mine.

Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart.

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Writing is a mysterious activity.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

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

Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward

Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.

In a way, I was safe writing

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?

Pen-bereavement is a serious matter.

The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.

I realized that your mother couldn't see the emptiness, she couldn't see anything...All of the words I'd written to her over all of those years, had I never said anything to hear at all?

In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.

If heaven is tolerant and writers are allowed (bunch of liars though they are), I wonder if they gather for coffee to ponder the prose they should have written instead.

Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it.

And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

It wouldn't happen... There hasn't been one publication by a monkey

A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.