Writing Quotes

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

The compact between writing and walking is almost as old as literature -- a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.

The simple everyday experiences become the doorway to new thoughts and inspirations.

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables.

My language is the common prostitute that I turn into a virgin.

To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.

...there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

We need writers who fear nothing. ("Our Goal")

Every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out.

Families are great murderers of the creative impulsive, particularly husbands.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

I found I was repeating myself. It is the beginning of the end when you discover you have style.

All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

Others may write from the head, but he writes from the heart, and the heart will always understand him.

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

I think my biggest revelation was to write entirely from the heart, and to convey emotion, even when it meant forcing myself to feel uncomfortable in doing so.

I did keep a travel diary once and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

Write only of what is important and eternal.

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.

Once in a while I catch myself wondering whether I would have found the courage to write if I had not started to write when I was too young to know what was good for me.

Writing music is like tasting the sky. It keeps me dreaming in color.

Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

Tell a story! Don't try to impress your reader with style or vocabulary or neatly turned phrases. Tell the story first!

Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.

Publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Well, I started writing songs about three years ago when I learned to play the guitar, but I've been singing since I was eleven.

The best friend a man can have is reading and writing, and the bad ones to avoid are Go and chess and flute and pipe.

Yes, letter writing is antiquated - though there remain a few renegades who still so treasure the luxury of contemplating their lives in letters that they would rather write than call.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.