Writing Quotes

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.

You can't edit a blank page

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

The desire to write grows with writing.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Old words are reborn with new faces.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

In case my life should end with the cannibals, I hope they will write on my tombstone, 'We have eaten Dr. Schweitzer. He was good to the end.'

Great novelists are philosopher novelists - that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.

I have no education, I have no academic background in painting or in music, but I write music and I compose music and I write and I sell paintings, and my rule is, well, they can't arrest me.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

Adverbs are a sign that you've used the wrong verb.

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

When I'm writing, I know I'm doing the thing I was born to do.

All I am is the trick of words writing themselves.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

I think best with a pencil in my hand.

I do outlines when I'm writing with someone, but they also need to have a certain amount of freedom

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

I really want to help write women back into history.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

The writing process is very much like being in a dark tunnel, and you don't really know what you will end up with until you have created it.

To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.

This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.