Writing Advice Quotes

Writing Advice Quote of the day

Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

Write what should not be forgotten.

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

Beware of advice-even this.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.

Writing is the act of discovery.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

I took William Zinsser's advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you.

Don't take anyone's writing advice too seriously.

There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that, but you are the only you.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell.

The beauty of Goodreads is that you know you’re sowing in a field where everyone, by definition and self-selection, loves to read.

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

Do you know what the difference is between PR and advertising? Advertising is when you say how great you are. PR is when other people say how great you are. PR is better.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

The best advice is not to write what you know, it's to write what you like.

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

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