Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 4

A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.

Agona Apell

I have never known anything to be as exquisite or as excruciating as the Love-Hate relationship I have with writing.

Tonny K. Brown

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

E B White

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer or an author must always be the no.1 fan of his/her book.

Aditi Dufare

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

Avijeet Das

Shy people are my favorites. The unmistakable glint of shyness in someone's eyes can mesmerize me for years!

Avijeet Das

But what is life without a passion?

Avijeet Das

Things that only a writer would understand—you’re writing a character—you tell that character who she or he is and they stop you and make it clear, they are the ones telling their story. You just have to let them tell it.

Lisa Marbly-Warir

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

Avijeet Das

Writers don't suffer from insanity, they depend upon it!

Avijeet Das

Now memories have an unusual way of coming back to you in the middle of a day.

Avijeet Das

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing this trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

Duncan B Barlow

If you don’t write your memoirs down then time will swallow them up, leaving no leftovers.

Sahara Sanders

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Joan Didion

I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

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

Martin Amis

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard

Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.

Ernest Hemingway

Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough.

Arthur Freed

If you're a writer, you'll know it by the distinct feeling of only being able to breathe properly when alone with your characters. All other times, I'm panting--just pining for the next time I can be with them.

Karen Luellen

There's a difference between writing for a living and writing forlife. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises....If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,not what pays

Toni Morrison

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. 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.

Stephen King

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite:"Fool!" said my muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write.

Philip Sidney

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

William Carlos Williams

Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.

Steven Brust

Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

Virginia Woolf

A writer's life is never boring when you have imaginary friends to play with!

Christie Silvers

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

Thomas Pynchon

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

Horace

...but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

Betsy Lerner

If one can, anyone can.If two can, you can, too!

Nancy I. Sanders

A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first

Louis L'Amour

Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

Félix J. Palma

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Marcel Proust

I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.

Hunter S. Thompson

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

Marguerite Duras

The writing in itself is transformative for me.

Sophia Rose

Your eyes make me pick up my pen and write.

Avijeet Das

Just me, my music, and the voices in my head.

Christie Silvers

Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

Christy Hall

Never try to keep it professional, keep it smutty, write with bodily fluids on sandpaper, and damn the men with clipboards in white suits, the literary bean-counters, the prose police.

Peter Selgin

The only thing you really need to be a writer is time. Regular, consistent time, quality time when you're not tired. I write on the bus to and from work, that's my time, 1 or 2 hours every single day. Make the time, keep at it, and you'll be a real writer before you know it.

Jonathan Maas

When you write a manuscript, it feels like being in a relationship with someone. You'll hate it, get bored with it, be pissed of, like you just want to break up. But, just like any relationship, you will fall in love again and again, like you don't want to lose it.

Alvi Syahrin

Fiction is a careful combination of observation, inspiration, and imagination.

Luke Taylor

Getting started on writing a book isn't as hard as it sounds. You don't need a plan and an outline. In fact, all you need are two things: time and one idea.

Natasha Lester

To unlock the writer's block is to keep writing until you can unknot the "not". If you cannot, then put a can in the plot and unwrap it a lot!

Ana Claudia Antunes

Writing reflects life and life is a mystery. All any of us can do is press the fleet footed beauty of life close to our flesh and use whatever instruments are within our grasp to express the evanescent spark of mysticism that resides within us.

Kilroy J. Oldster

But for many writers, and to borrow a popular cliché, it’s like getting blood from a stone. You have the want and the desire, but with experience and time, your self-doubt becomes louder and your inner critic comes out to play. It silences your creativity. You feel you aren’t allowed to make mistakes.

Karina Halle

Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.

William Goldman

Writing when perched along a ledge of conscious awareness while simultaneously giving voice to the unconscious voice tumbling within allows a writer to tap into the external world of the known while also exploring the unconscious world of the unknown and the unknowable. For as long as I can stand the mounting pressure, I dance along this tremulous thin line separating sanity and insanity, mediating the conflicts between a lucid intellect and an impulsive, instinctual nature. Captivated in this submerged psyche space, disengaged from conscious tether of personal identity, and free from the jaundiced constraints and dictatorial commands of rational logic, I operate unencumbered by preconceived limitations.

Kilroy J. Oldster

We will always come against people who don't like our books. People who think what we're doing is trivial or cliché or tries too hard. But there will always be people who love what we do and we have to take those good moments to heart.

Duncan B Barlow

Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer’s is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times.

Kilroy J. Oldster

As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.

Avijeet Das

It's a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.

Andrew M Greeley

At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind’s dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind’s dungeons.

Avijeet Das

Write what you wish with your soul and your heart will fill the page with your unique magic.

Ben Tolosa

I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.

M.V. Carey

Young people ask why I became a writer, as if it were something I decided. I didn't decide; it grew on me like ivy.

M.V. Carey

More and more I don't have any philosophy about writing, except that it is something we can do if God is good to us. Of course we are the ones who have to do the paperwork.

M.V. Carey

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Writers On Writing Quotes - Page 4

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