What Is Writing Quotes

You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

There is no such thing as an "aspiring writer". You are a writer. Period.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.

We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

You are either born a writer or you are not.

Realism can break a writer's heart.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

I never met a word I didn't love

There are very few innocent sentences in writing.

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal.

I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

In a sense who you are has always been a story that you told to yourself. Now your self is a story that you tell to others.

Write like it matters, and it will.

After you have finished a piece of work, the work is then none of your business. Go on and do something else.

I wisely started with a map.

What is written is merely the dregs of experience.

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there.

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work — not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile

Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Because words have deep meaning, Tweets have power.

Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.

It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.