Writing Quotes

Don't explain why it works; explain how you use it.

It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.

If you do not hear music in your words, you have put too much thought into your writing and not enough heart.

I wrote my first book when I was 22 years old. I have a way with words and I love to write. I can write without getting writers block so I knew, it was a gift.

Every man is a book in which God himself writes.

I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

I am always at a loss at how much to believe of my own stories.

I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

A mixtape is for the street, it's something you without necessarily thinking about it, because you have to stay in the game. It's like writing an e-mail saying hello to your friends.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

A writer is a world trapped in a person.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.

Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.

If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

I felt like poisoning a monk.

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

It's easy to write one's memoirs when one has a terrible memory.