Writing Quotes

Survivors of the red pen can overcome the blank paper…

Speak in your own voice about the things that matter to you.

Every exceptional writer holds a Master of Arts in Daydreaming.

For the real writers, every decision is either write or wrong.

my poetry is merely a body.you are the soul in my words.

It’s very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that’s something that resonates for me.

Readers are the glue that binds the books together.

I have a great book. It’s called Stantasyland. Except I don’t have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.

Beginning hook readers. Endings create fans.

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Does rejection ever get any easier? Only if we decide not to invest emotion in the dismissal…

Contemporary writers annoyed him, he found their worlds insular, their style too self-conscious and ironic. Theirs was not a literature that belonged to him.

I swooned again – I had that moment of falling in love with reading again.

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.

I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.

You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?

Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.

The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.

In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today's writing falls into the first category.

A writer writes knowing that nothing else will elicit the same kind of satisfaction and personal triumph as molding the written word into a reader's great experience.

Some writers are born. Others learn. I was born a writer but have a lot to learn.

Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.

But writers and their woes: they couldn't be parted. Not for anything.

Not everyone will like what you write but there's a certain group who'll love what you write. Keep WRITING for them.

Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.

When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend’s sisters, I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.

Being able to read well in public and talk about your work in an engaging fashion is part of most writers' job specification.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

To write a good book, you must read one book for each page of the book you are about to write.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

I propose that every person out of work be required to submit a book report before he or she gets his or her welfare check.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.

Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.

Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.

I became a writer so that the voices inside my head would become an acceptable occurrence.

Nothing leaves a scar upon an Authors heart more than a book they've written with purpose going unread.

As long as music survives, poetry will never die.

America takes her writers too seriously.

If you're frightened of the countless number of books in the library, you'll never write anything, until you close your eyes and hold the pen.

It's hard to be a dreamer sometimes. I'm tired.

Wine and a straitjacket. That pretty much sums it up.

No.'It's not a bad word. And it is very important to use at times. Practice saying it in the mirror. It's empowering.

Nothing is louder than silence.

Writers start with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.

Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.

A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.