Writing Life Quotes - Page 3

What do you do when your head - your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?You focus on the really good ones!

Storm Princeholm

However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a factory: just a meaningless production of words.

Alice Driver

Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden....

Gerard Olson

I wanted to do it once. Be a writer. Now I'm near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don't get me wrong -- I'm incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I'll say it just once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life -- especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve -- you have to go after it and do it now. Or in not very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it.

Alena Graedon

It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Tim Kreider

You are what you write.

Ayah.A

Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.

Chloe Thurlow

Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that’s okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.

Robin Black

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

Ann Patchett

Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If I propose to myself and myself says yes, I get to have the cake, right? I love me, so I’m thinking 12 tiers.

Michelle M. Pillow

Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you.

Laini Taylor

For me, writing was the only way out.

Anne Tyler

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

Philip Pullman

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Originality also brings on the most merciless attacks. The world resents originality in the beginning writer, and then rewards it abundantly once that writer has been successfully published. Cherish your own voice. Don't try to sound like anybody else. Sound like yourself and take the slings and arrows and keep going.

Anne Rice

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

John Irving

Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.

Bonnie Friedman

My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me “a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.

Nenia Campbell

Beware of being only a writer.

Miranda Paul

Don’t ask for advice too much. Go with you, as gritty as that might be at times.

Porochista Khakpour

In her spare time she scribbled her thoughts, wishes and dreams, life and times. It kept her sane despite her loneliness.

Aporva Kala

Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.

Alane Adams

I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.

Chloe Thurlow

One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.

Ella J. Fraser

Books are like horcruxes--without all the evil--because a piece of the author goes into each one.

Ella J. Fraser

Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages.

Michelle C. Hillstrom

He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossedaway from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases and assembled like a new life.

Jeffry R. Halverson

Writing is my joy, is my comfort zone, it strengthens my feeble knees and it frees my troubled heart.

Euginia Herlihy

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.

Norbet Platt

The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfectharmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hiddendreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life—now thatcannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled uponthrough ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on alucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You mayhappen upon it without realising that this is the work throughwhich your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. Weshould always be humble. Creativity should always be a form ofprayer.

Ben Okri

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Tim Kreider

No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.

Irwin Shaw

Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.

Darynda Jones

The beauty of writing is imagining new endings to a time of darkness, like burning off a morning fog with the heat and clarity of the sun.

J.J. Brown

There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if ‘productivity’ and/or ‘usefulness’ are the measures of human value, and — particularly for artists — this is deeply problematic. We shouldn’t given in.

Tasha Golden

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . .What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.Finding the right balance of feedback—encouragement versus vigorous criticism—will help immeasurably.But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.If it’s any consolation, I’m still working on this final lesson.

Steve Almond

Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.

Robin Black

A daily written thankful gratitude is a heavenly blessing.

Lailah Gifty Akita

...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.

P.G. Wodehouse

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

Stephen King

Write to evolve and you'll evolve to write.

Katina Ferguson

Forget how long the path to finishing your story. Address only what you have to write today.

Martha Alderson

He said: I don't like to read. And I said, honey, you haven't found the right girl.

Chloe Thurlow

Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.

Martha Reed

Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.

Chloe Thurlow

One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)

Jeannette Walls

Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.

Jonathan Heatt

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

Jorge Luis Borges

Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.

Roman Payne

I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.

Dani Shapiro

Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.

Alane Adams

I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.

Dani Shapiro

So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.

Glen Hirshberg

Live first, write second.

Miranda Paul

The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.

Elizabeth Berg

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I’d learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014

Mitch Kellaway

Write and keep writing, not because people will like it, but because someone may get a kick out of thrashing your book.

Magus Tor

There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.

Jeffrey A. Carver

I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block?" No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.

Larry Kahaner

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.

Anne Rice

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Writing Life Quotes - Page 3

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