What Is Writing Quotes

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.

Don't write outlines; I hate outlines.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

I wanted to write a big novel, something epic in scale.

I've been very lucky. There were times when I was afraid I would never sell another book, but I never doubted I'd write another book.

I think my very earliest stories were all intellectual exercises and I was writing from experiences I had never had about characters who were about an inch deep.

One of the hardest parts of writing is writing from the gut or the heart or something like that rather than intellectually.

We shall not busy ourselves with what men ought to have admired, what they ought to have written, what they ought to have thought, but with what they did think, write, admire.

Writing a journal means that facing your ocean you are afraid to swim across it, so you attempt to drink it drop by drop.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

I'm always nice when I do drugs. But, you know, I'm nicer on the drug called "writing."

The chances of a person breaking through their own habits and sloth and limited mind to actually write something that gets out there and matters to people are slim.

When I write I know that I'm going to have to produce 40 percent more than I need.

The story sometimes writes you into a corner.

I always describe writing a story as throwing bowling pins in the air and then catching them.

I've always wanted to write energetic, atypical sentences, i.e., sentences that were not normal or bland.

Whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations.

I don't really do much social media. I just don't like it that much. I've trained myself to write very slowly for a lot of money so it really galls me to write quickly for free.

Even if something within me is ugly, writing is a pretty good place to play with that thing and to begin to really see it.

While I'm doing [writing], I don't feel it.I don't think that's a failing. I think it's just a feature. Like, a feature of oneself.

While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.

I think that feels like it to me. I mean whenever you talk about writing I think you have to remember that it all has a big question mark over it - every word has a big question mark over it.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

As far as which writers embody this form of gentle power - Tobias Wolff, for sure. His persona and his writing both share an easy, capacious confidence that says he has faith in his readers.

I don't really write beautifully naturally, unlike some people.

In Braille you write your flat sign first and then your note.

The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men's genius.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

We expect the states to show us whether or not we're achieving simple objectives-like literacy, literacy in math, the ability to read and write.

I'm uncomfortable trying to rush change of perception, except to the extent that I'm going to write a book.

When you're writing about something that happened, it helps you transition to the present.

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don't have to draw you a picture; a hint will do."

Invariably, it is this for which I write: the joy ... of an argument firmly made, like a nail straightly driven, its head flush to the plank.

To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.

It's easy to get into an easy routine but the problem with that is you can tend to write the same song over and over again.

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.

One thing I don't think that we have enough of in wine writing is the use of cause and effect. Whatever wine tastes like, whatever you're going to do with it, it is as it is for a reason.

Writing, not dancing, is the chosen form of expression of the white man.

Theirs is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on, or someone must write "The End" to it. I have concluded that only I can do that. And if I can, I must.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

I wish there were some photographic process by which one's mind could be struck off and transferred to that of the friend we wish to know it, without the medium of this confounded letter-writing!

The way I write is that, every time I reintroduced a character, I'd have to face some kind of inner demon.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

Jody Houser, who writes Mother Panic, has this noir-ish superhero style. She's very adaptable.