Writing Quotes

The voice in my head has a stutter, and that's really annoying. D-D-D-Dave Dave. What? K-K-K-Kill your p-p-p-parents. L-L-L-Loa... Write it down!

As trait after trait swings into focus and fulfillment, can we write any other name under Isaiah's amazing portrait of the sublime Sufferer in Chapter 53 than Jesus of Nazareth?

As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

The first time I went to Wales I thought I'd landed in a land of hobbits. Everybody was really small and the houses were small and the writing was backwards.

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get lucky.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.

There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.

I just love life. I love people. I love to write, that's my gift. I love to sing. I have a good attitude. I like to think I shine from the inside.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

Words that in their everyday surrealism have no parallel in contemporary writing... Music that mines the deep veins of fatalism in the Appalachian voice

Stationery is addictive. I get mine made in Paris at Benetton, and writing on it gives me a strange thrill.

In writing and politicking, it's best not to think about it, just do it.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

Ministers never write or preach so well as when under the cross.

If the storytellers told it true, all stories would end in death.

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

Until you know who you are you can’t write.

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.

Matriarchy is a time-honored staple for any writer looking to invent an exotic society.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

End with an image and don't explain.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.