Writing Quotes

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while.

I am not an ornithologist—I am a bird.

I became a physicist to understand the world, then I became a writer to try and change it.

To write a novel is to dream while awake, then express the dream to the reader in an absorbing way. The road leading from the writer's inner world to the readers' is paved with prose.

Good science fiction has its roots in good science.

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

May it be written. May it be done.

If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors.

I say, flawless poems do not exist.

Blank pages are cruelPure torture in white or beigeBut how else to start

I only ever wanted to feel more human.

At the end of all things, why do lovers break up? Because love is magic. You have to believe, for it to exist.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

You can't write a poem until you live.

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

She reminded me that I could write stories, /could be struck by lightning & live.

The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us. (...) Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.

… this is my first language.” {on Writing}

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

That's what novels are: They're amalgams of archetypes, collections of random traits one observes in other people through life, blended into fresh characters.

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

Her attachment to language was earthy, physical, and immediate. Pretty words you could eat.

There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs.

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

...you do violence with your words if you force them - art is given - the words received, moment by moment from unseen hands - call it a Muse ...

Music is a language - and language, at its finest, should be music.

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

I write about love all the time, what a tragedy those stories turn into.

That’s why I wanted to be a writer - because someone I loved told me I could be one.

I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

When you travel, appreciate the culture of the people in the land.

The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.

Art is the bridge across the gap between peoples and cultures. Writing is one of the arts that can help link people.

I would say about 80% of my writing (including posts and blogs), has to do with unresolved anger and that's just fine with me

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

When writing for children, it's important to keep in touch with our own inner child. What frightened them, made them happy, made them sad or angry?

There are some places you can't visit anymore, poetry and writings take you there.

Thinking before writing how I feel. That's how I'm able to write all the lies and wrongs. How else can one write something like a fake smile ?