Writers On Writing Quotes

I should be writing ...

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

Becoming a writer does not mean words will suddenly flow with perfection from your pen. It takes hard work, rejection, and the willingness to lay everything inside you out for the world to see.

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

You will not publish 100% of the books you don’t write.

There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

Make today the day you begin that awesome idea you have had for years. Now go, write this book, and remember that today is an important day in history.

It's good to write badly. Things can only get better.

Introduction of deus ex machina is a tell-tale sign of sloppy plotting.

Some of the best characters are the most flawed characters.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

Ink, a Drug.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.

She cured me of my sadness.

One day someone will fall in love with you despite all your flaws! Then magic will happen in your life!

You made a poet fall in love with the world.

Writing is probably the only form of art, through which you can express, which you would otherwise wouldn't dare to say in person....

I reside in an abode where your thoughts imagine me... You reside in my heart where the auricles camouflage my longing...

Put emotions to thoughts. Thoughts to words. Words to paragraphs. Paragraphs to pictures. Let your mind be known, heard and seen. Your thoughts are real as it could be.

Begin to write, your heart will flow with sacred words.

The planet you inhabit is a single plane of infinite dimensions, stretched like a guitar string, and standing before you like a concubine waiting for your command.

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

There are times when I'm writing where time feels irrelevant. Those are the moments I know I'm creating magic.

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, " while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

To my faithful readers, because a book is like a pie—the only thing more satisfying than cooking up the story is knowing that somebody might be out there eating it up with a spoon.

They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?

Each morning the winds of the city moan and weep with lost souls clinging to hope of reliving the memories of yesterday.

Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.

Though this child came in with nothing but excess baby fat, chemical brain waves, and mother and son bodily toxins on his legs, he had a fate fit for a modern day demigod.

Writing is a way of life.

When writing feels like jumping a cliff, grab the nearest pen!

A writer or an author must always be the no.1 fan of his/her book.

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.

A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...

Writers have to be tenacious to the point of being pathological. Rejection and criticism is assured.

A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.