Writing Life Quotes

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.

Leo Rosten

If you can't stand your own company alone in a room for long hours, or, when it gets tough, the feeling of being in a locked cell, or, when it gets tougher still, the vague feeling of being buried alive--then don't be a writer.

Graham Swift

I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.

Allison M. Dickson

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.” Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Stephen King

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death.

Kate Forsyth

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to be so naive as to believe that a book will make it merely because it's good.

Richard Curtis

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

John Irving

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easiest is, when once an original line has been struck out, to follow it up, and to write any amount more to the same tune.

Lewis Carroll

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

John Irving

Writing is a 24/7 job. You live it, eat it, breathe it... the pay can be pretty lousy, but you do it happily, because you love it!!! That, and from the day you started writing the voices in your head became a permanent fixture :) ... oh, missed one out - You sleep it!

Patti Roberts

Do what you love, especially if your sharing the word

Ann Simpson

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...

Stephen King

There are three certainties in a writer's life: death, taxes, and rejection letters.

T.L. Rese

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

T.L. Rese

You’re a loner in body, mind, and soul. A writer who spends a day of solitude in the office is plagued by a mind that travels with the body. The work never stops.

Bruce Obee

When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.

Donald Richie

Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.

Ray Bradbury

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

Shelby Foote

What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.

Donald Richie

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.

Hunter S. Thompson

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...

Richard Russo

A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.

Eric Maisel

I refuse to give up when things go wrong because there is always a sliver lining behind the cloud.

Millicent Ashby

I do enjoy writing, and I hope someone gets something interesting out of this book. I already have. Now, If I ever have to write a book that is not about me, I may be totally stumped and have writer's block. We will see. Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn't know what to do next. You could hire someone to write it for you if you can't write it yourself. That doesn't seem to matter. Just don't hire some sweaty hack who asks you questions for years and twists them into his own vision of what is right or wrong. Try to avoid doing that.

Neil Young

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

Neil Young

Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.

Rachelle McCalla

I don't think you can reach your potential as a writer unless you're a passionate reader, AND read passionately.

Michelle D. Kwasney

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.

Anna Buchan

To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.

Michele Garber

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.

Steven Pressfield

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...

Joan Didion

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s half a boy.

Arthur Conan Doyle

When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, "I kill people." This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from my seat-mate. Only peace and quiet. Rare is the fellow passenger who asks why I do it.I suppose I got tired hanging out in a book all day waiting for a story to begin. I write the kind of novels I want to read. And why the theme of solving murders? Violent death is larger than life and it's the great equalizer. By law, every victim is entitled to a paladin and a chase, else life would be cheapened.And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life. If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum... but I have never done that.The heart of my theory has puritan roots: if you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work.

Carol O'Connell

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. . . I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Robert Hughes

I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.

Rayne Hall

The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.

Mo Yan

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.

Bell Hooks

Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.

Jessica E. Larsen

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .

Lee Gutkind

Life is too short to dwell in the negativity all the time.

Michelle M. Pillow

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Graham Greene

Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.

Carl Henegan

Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.

Victoria Sawyer

It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.

Django Wylie

Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .

Dennis R. Miller

I feel the most alive when I write.

Kristy Brown

Word count doesn't tell me when a story ends, my characters will tell me.

Kristy Brown

Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.

Caron Kamps Widden

...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror......there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...

Robert A. Heinlein

Writing is the act of discovery.

Natalie Goldberg

So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

Peter Heller

Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as creator but seldom see "creator" as the literal term for "artist". I am suggesting you take the term "creator" quite literally. You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator. Accepting this concept can greatly expand your creative possibilities.

Julia Cameron

I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.

Ron Carlson

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.

Billie Sue Mosiman

When sitting in an armchair isn't enough… I write. What I mean is that when it no longer suffices to sit and dream about travelling to other times, other places, I write about them instead. A most economical and safe form of time travel.

Anna Belfrage

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.

Martin Amis

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

Stendhal

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Writing Life Quotes

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