Writing Quotes

I have never found, in anything outside of the four walls of my study, an enjoyment equal to sitting at my writing desk with a clean page, a new theme, and a mind awake.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

If some of the people who write about mojo came with me for a week, they would drop dead on their feet.

A clear sentence is no accident.

I'm going to quit music. Then the government of Japan asked me to write a piano concerto - that was an offer I couldn't refuse, so that brought me back to music again.

Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

You write things that are of interest to you. There's no focus group.

Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood. The spell is on me.

I'm not a writer. I'm not smart. I couldn't possibly even write my own story.

As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark.

An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Writing only leads to more writing.

How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

I enjoy writing, I enjoy my house, my family and, more than anything I enjoy the feeling of seeing each day used to the full to actually produce something. The end.

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.

Agatha Christie has given more pleasure in bed than any other woman.

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

Hold your pen and spare your voice.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

To be an honest writer, you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.

There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.

The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.