Writing Life Quotes - Page 2

To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.

Patricia Hampl

Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.

David Morrell

Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.

Barbara Abercrombie

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. "This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends." He stared at the paintings for a long time and then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.

David Morrell

The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Annie Dillard

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

Isabel Huggan

A 15-minute gap in your day is plenty of time to write and read, but not if you check your email first.

M.J. Pullen

I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.

Peter James West

Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.

Peter James West

On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.

Peter James West

Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.

Buffy Andrews

I do not, can not write just for money. Lord knows I haven't made much. I write because it is what my Father has given me to do. I do not mean that He woke me one morn, put His finger to my forehead and commanded me write. I mean He quietly and gently in His grace, whispered into my head, into my heart: courage to fail, confidence to succeed, belief in my ability to learn and in my own self worth. So in thankfulness I write.

Stanley Christopher

I read your diary. I KNOW.

Mary Papas

The only man she ever loved. And hated.

Mary Papas

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Steven Pressfield

Research" is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING

Rayne Hall

To get over artist's block, make shitty art.

Dave Horowitz

May my mind be clear and my heart pure.

Joanie Schirm

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

Yiyun Li

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

Angeline Trevena

If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.

Barbara Baig

Because. Everything worth anything takes time.

Christy Hall

Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.

Chila Woychik

Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.

Chila Woychik

Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.

Chila Woychik

I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?

Chila Woychik

Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.

Chila Woychik

You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.

Chila Woychik

The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.

Chila Woychik

If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.

Chila Woychik

I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.

Chila Woychik

You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.

Christy Hall

Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.

Christy Hall

Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.

Chila Woychik

I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.

Chila Woychik

New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.

Christy Hall

Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.

Chila Woychik

Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yield to the tug of imagination. Ordinary people may practice for years to 'perfect' the challenge of writing; but the one destined to create and destroy with the stroke of a pen, the strike of the key, their wells of imagination shall never run dry.

Brian A. McBride

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...

Michael Crichton

If I don't stay in and write, I feel like a prisoner.

Carla H. Krueger

I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don't just tie on a pair of running shoes and go out and run a marathon. You have to be in running shape, just like you have to be in writing shape.

Julie Tetel Andresen

...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.

John Gardner

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

Alexander Chee

Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.

Mindie Burgoyne

The Baby Name book can be a very dangerous tool in the hands of a prolific author.

Michelle M. Pillow

I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean they can't behave like decent human beings.

Gert Loveday

But if the Busyness = Status equation works, it’s strictly because a social game has emerged wherein relatively privileged, educated people with all kinds of Choice disguise their decisions to be busy as manifestations of the universe’s insatiable demand for their particular prowess. And the rest of us agree to be impressed. It’s a stupid game. We can stop any time.

Tasha Golden

Still writing?" I usually nod and smile, then quickly change the subject. But here is what I would like to put down my fork and say: Yes, yes, I am. I will write until the day I die, or until I am robbed of my capacity to reason. Even if my fingers were to clench and wither, even if I were to grow deaf or blind, even if I were unable to move a muscle in my body save for the blink of one eye, I would still write. Writing saved my life. Writing has been my window -- flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence -- my way of interpreting everything within my grasp. Writing has extended that grasp by pushing me beyond comfort, beyond safety, past my self-perceived limits. It has softened my heart and hardened my intellect. It has been a privilege. It has whipped my ass. It has burned into me a valuable clarity. It has made me think about suffering, randomness, good will, luck, memory responsibility, and kindness, on a daily basis -- whether I feel like it or not. It has insisted that I grow up. That I evolve. It has pushed me to get better, to be better. It is my disease and my cure. It has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses -- to chip away at my own bewilderment until I find the pattern in it. Once in a great while, I look up at the sky and think that, if my father were alive, maybe he would be proud of me. That if my mother were alive, I might have come up with the words to make her understand. That I am changing what I can. I am reaching a hand out to the dead and to the living and the not yet born. So yes. Yes. Still writing.

Dani Shapiro

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I’m sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.

Shannon Celebi

I live, love and loathe my characters. They stole my mind. They stole my heart.

Carla H. Krueger

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

John Irving

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

John Irving

A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.

Christy Hall

My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.

Carla H. Krueger

I still love the sound of breaking,the tearing of the page

Dean Young

I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!

Christy Hall

Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.

Stefanos Livos

Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.

Robin Black

A writer will always be a writer. It's not a choice, it's a destiny.

Stephanie Lennox

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Writing Life Quotes - Page 2

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