Writing Quotes

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.

When you have a good romance, find ways to make their lives miserable and hellish...Do you think 'Titanic' would have been so popular if they had both lived? Not a prayer.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

What is important is the story. Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin - when we're dancing with our own skeletons - our words might be all that's left of us.

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.

Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining.

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.

In Hollywood, no one knows anything.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place

The best writing is rewriting.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

To write simply is as difficult as to be good.

Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

I just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.

The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation.

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.

It perhaps might be said--if any one dared--that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.

When a writer tries to explain too much, he's out of time before he begins.

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

When you write, you write out of your best self. Everything else drops away.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It's easy to make up weird stuff. It gets trickier when you want the weird stuff to be interesting and make sense.

Don't be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.