Writing Quotes

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

This, then, is what counts: a lightning reaction which has no further need of conscious observation. In this respect at least the pupil makes himself independent of all conscious purpose.

Those who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write, Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

Writing is one of the easiest things: erasing is one of the hardest.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands are too shaky to perform operations, he becomes a journalist.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

You can cover a great deal of country in books.

The words get easier the moment you stop fearing them.

Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it.

In a weak moment, I have written a book.

Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.

Whether you're keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it's the same thing. What's important is you're having a relationship with your mind.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.

A nation writes its history in the image of its ideal.

We're writing a book together. She just finished one. Did you read it? Among the Porcupines?

Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.

We have a tradition of passing our history orally and singing a lot of it and writing songs about it and there's kind of a calling in Irish voices when they're singing in their Irish accent.

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

Writing poetry is a pleasure,...a pleasure out of hell

I am writing a book and that takes third place of importance.

Too indolent to bear the toil of writing; I mean of writing well; I say nothing about quantity. [Lat., Piger scribendi ferre laborem; Scribendi recte, nam ut multum nil moror.]

I think when you're writing songs, it's impossible to not draw on personal experiences, whether it be traveling or girls, or anything.

I'm writing songs with the hope someone can get behind my feeling.

If you want to write, keep cats.

The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the forces of the circumstances render them impossible.

I write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.

Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

To be the kind of writer you want to be, you must first be the kind of thinker you want to be.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective

Whether we like it or not, life has a lot of drama and pain. But God is writing a great story. Are we going to let Him? Are we going to trust Him?

You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't.

It makes me feel wonderful that people still care for me... that I have so many fans among young people, who write to me and tell me I have been an inspiration.

I am not alone. Whatever else there was or is, writing is with me.

Language is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.