Writing Quotes

Only write if you can't not.

This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes, ” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.

When the door to my writing chamber gasps shut and the almost imperceptible sigh of a rose petal falls on my desk, I know that my muse is present.

I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.

[I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

The greatest writers have persistence.

The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

Writing is a manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

(T)hey were at ease with each other, which was essential to a productive workshop.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

Put the baby on the paper.

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.

Rituals help us change modes.

The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

The experience of returning to the blank page and having nothing in the drawer was intensely painful. I just thought, I never want that to happen again.

The novel cannot submit to authority.

A sense of mission lostin ink'sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn't recognize at first.

Every word Martone sets down, finally, a choice that limits the universe, their trail across the page a fossil record of some life's life-story.

Ennui had more distractions far more amusing than the automatons of a watchmaker in Mühlenberg.

Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.

Words and magic are two powerful forces that can change the world.

I cry often. I cry and cleanse my face with my tears and swim to the center of it all. A center that I have written about a thousand times, forever etched into the porcelain.

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Writing is the new reading

Always choose love over fear.

We are the thoughts we choose to keep.

Writer: It's not an occupation it's a compulsion.

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.

Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.

I think maybe today a poem I hopeafter breakfast I start tryingpulling it out of my own gutmostly by force

Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.

When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.", 6 March 2012]

The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.

If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.

The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.

It's quite simple. I just don't feel right without a pen in my hand denting a hole through my notepad.

Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.

A writer who’s a pro can take on almost any assignment, but if he or she doesn’t much care about the subject, I try to dissuade the writer, as in that case the book can be just plain hard labor.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.

Writing is not just a process of creation. It is also a process of self-discovery

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft. If you want to write, practice writing.

...ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse.