Writing Life Quotes - Page 6

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.

Read more, Write anything, Earn Everything

I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.

Troye Sivan

Everyone, except a writer, thinks writing is easy. Writing is tough. Being a disciplined writer is tougher.

Tarang Sinha

Frankly, if there ever was a time when I was really happy, it wasn't during those first intoxicating moments of my success, but long before that, when I hadn't yet read or shown my manuscript to anyone -- during those long nights of ecstatic hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I had grown attached to my vision, to the characters I had created myself, as though they were my own offspring, as though they really existed -- and I loved, rejoiced and grieved over them, at times even shedding quite genuine tears over my guileless hero.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If I don't write every single day, I feel like I am off balance. My mind does not work correctly. I actually feel a sensation like an ache going on inside me equivalent to when a person misses a loved one.

Levon Peter Poe

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.

Flannery O'Connor

For the curious, I write

Veronica Purcell

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?

Elena Ferrante

In the best interest of profession, a writer should sometimes refrain from writing.

Ramana Pemmaraju

Reading/writing is a chance to live a different life in a different world.

Tarang Sinha

Too many stories. Not enough Tim.

Timothy Trimble

The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.

Alina Stefanescu

When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.

Elena Ferrante

Dreams are there for those who dare to dream them.

R.K. King

Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange “sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can’t wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human’s hand.

Sahara Sanders

Only a writer holds conversations between people that don't exist. We don't talk to ourselves. We talk to people we created from nothing.#FromTheInternet #AuthorUnknown

Unknown

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

Ernest Hemingway

When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

Imagination, curiosity, passion, creativity these are the words that move me!

Samuel Colbran

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Graham Greene

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.

Simone de Beauvoir

Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!

Samuel Colbran

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

Eudora Welty

Even a baby can write a poem. It doesn't guarantee the sale.

Bhavik Sarkhedi

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

Cynthis Ozick

Writing, unfortunately, takes last priority for my time but it's the first priority in my heart I wish I had all the time for. Such is reality.

Veronica Purcell

All it takes is one word, one action, one voice. Believe in yourself, and you can accomplish anything!

Samuel Colbran

Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.

Catherine Carrigan

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

Grace Paley

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children—you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it.

Sahara Sanders

In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.

R.M. Donaldson

The more you doubt your talent and strive to improve, the better the writer.

Stephanie Ayers

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.

John McPhee

When I consider writing I sometimes wonder why doesn't everybody do it, other times I wonder why does anybody do it.

Tonny K. Brown

Authors, such as William Zinsser, Steven Pinker, Natalie Goldberg, and Stephen King, who have all written exquisite books on the art and craft of writing, have reminded me that it is the commitment to the craft that matters the most; the longing to get better and the countless hours of work that go into writing and rewriting. To them I am eternally grateful.

Gudjon Bergmann

Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin...

Gudjon Bergmann

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least.

Elizabeth Gilbert

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

Roman Payne

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

Roman Payne

Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own

Carla H. Krueger

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.

Karl Wiggins

writing is vulnerable is power is freedom.

Anna Quinn

What power--what importance--lies in the blank lines of an open notebook. Go and fill yours. Then share.

Penny Kittle

Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.

Heena Rathore P.

There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.

Carla H. Krueger

By living, thinking, even dreaming the story in one continuous process, ideas came faster and faster. Sometimes the typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if my fingers could keep up with them. And at the finish of the story I often had to take a few days off as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book.

Walter B Gibson

A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure

Karl Wiggins

Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk

Karl Wiggins

RACHEL MADDUX | ON STAYING HUNGRY Hunger is everything because it’s nothing - not yet - just raw promise, one lack that may eclipse others: talent, pedigree, luck. Like sharks, the hungry must always keep moving, hunting, killing, “killing it.” - Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living

Rachael Maddux

There is nothing to writing. You nourish your creativity for months and years until you release your baby out into the world.

Lydia Larue

He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

Jo Baker

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

Igor Stravinsky

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Louis L'Amour

Creating characters is easy. It’s getting them to behave that’s the problem.

Steven Ramirez

Previous 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 13 Next

Writing Life Quotes - Page 6

Related Topics