Writing Life Quotes - Page 7

It’s amazing how fast you can write when there’s a gun to your head.

Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It’s the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.

Glen Hirshberg

Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End

Ken Scott

To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.

Steven Ramirez

Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are.

Nevea Lane

But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.

Katharine Weber

So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.

Steven Ramirez

Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!

Stella Atrium

Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.

Kayla Rae Whitaker

I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable

Alfred Lansing

MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.

John Rember

No one ever does the last thing on their list.

Ariel Gore

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Orson Scott Card

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

Frank Herbert

Everything is research.

Court Ellyn

To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.

Seamus Heaney

And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.

Charles Dickens

I should be writing ...

Mur Lafferty

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

David Foster Wallace

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.

Rod Serling

Some words may make you happy, some may make you said. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope. . . what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.

Patricia MacLachlan

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.

Gore Vidal

The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.

Javier A. Robayo

Writing is my life. Life is my hobby.

Emma Lai

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.

Ursula K Le Guin

I realized I was officially a professional writer when all my plans began with "drink coffee" and ended with "take a nap.

Cassandra Duffy

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.

Neil Gaiman

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.

Ernest Hemingway

Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . . . if only to reach but a few.

James D. Maxon

The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.

Chris Almeida

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.

Saul Bellow

I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

Ray Bradbury

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.

Zadie Smith

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

Pierre Berton

They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.

Andrew Barger

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

Richard B. Knight

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

Chuck Palahniuk

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Ernest Hemingway

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.

Stephen Fry

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

Stephen King

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.

David Lindsay-Abaire

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

Stephen King

you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Susan Cain

How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".

Shubham Choudhary

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

Virginia Woolf

Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.

Isaac Asimov

Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.

Greg Sisco

The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead

Warren Adler

When you can't enter through the front door, kick in a window.

Liz Fichera

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Ray Bradbury

... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

Monique Wittig

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

Virginia Woolf

Writers are a superior breed. No one else can face so much rejection and still thrive.

Susie Smith

You know you're a mom when you open the door to the dishwasher mid-cycle and think, 'This is the closest I'm going to get to a spa treatment till next Mother's Day.'""Joining the words 'Lose Weight, Effortlessly!' in the same sentence may be a form of hate speech.""Try to make time for the things that are important, not just the things that are urgent.""I want my work to matter, my words to count for the good, and to spread some good cheer along the way.

Judy Gruen

When people say, 'you're so young to be a writer,' I always reply, 'I started young because I've got a lot to write.

Carla H. Krueger

The misnomer is that satirists are pessimists, or even misanthropes, but usually it is just a way to unlock human potential.

Marietta Rodgers

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Writing Life Quotes - Page 7

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