Writing Quotes

After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.

William L. Stull

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.

Felicia Johnson

What fascinates me about writing is wrestling thought into reality and creating a new world that is forever.

Dennis R. Miller

Creating something is only half the battle. The other half is finding people who care about it.

Ramsey Isler

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

Markus Zusak

Writing is a solitary endeavor, being an author is not.

Karen A. Chase

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Rob Bignell

Trying to compose even a single sentence can have the same effect, as we try to juggle grammatical and syntactical alternatives plus all the possibilities of tone, nuance, and rhythm even a simple sentence offers. Composing, then, is a cognitive activity thatconstantly threatens to overload short-term memory.

Linda Flower

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Douglas C. Engelbart

Every book I've read appears in my writing.

Rob Bignell

There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.

Shonda Rhimes

I truly don’t understand why at every Q and A, someone always asks, “Do you have a routine?” or “Do you write every morning?” Why those questions remain interesting, I really have no idea. But since no one’s putting a gun to their head to ask them, they must compel. They’re probably necessary on a symbolic level more than a literal one, as people cobble together an imagination of what a life devoted to “making” might be like.[I think people want a path to follow. They want a checklist so they can say, “Alright cool, so if I get up at six and I write for this long and I watch this film and I do that…”]It’s weird, because I might have wanted that, too. I used to dance in New York. My Lower East Side days. Modern dance, or whatever. One thing I learned as a dancer was that people learn combinations different ways. Some people, if they get the right side, they can also get the left side right off the top of their head. Some people need to be taught both right and left. Some people count, some people never count, you know? I noticed then that, for me, it was really watching the whole person dancing, trying to take in the whole combination at once, that helped me learn it. I think I’m the same way as a reader—I like to take in the whole book, not getting too specific about how they did it, but ride the bigger example.I mean, at the end of the day, the answer to the question “How did you do it?” is right there, on the page. They’re showing you how they did it, by doing it. Maybe it’s different with art, when you don’t know if someone had all their sculptures knitted or welded by elves somewhere, but with writing, the answer to the question “How do you write a book like this?” is usually, “Like this” [points to book].

Maggie Nelson

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

Charles Bukowski

When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

John C. Bean

No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Writing is exposing yourself to strangers

Bangambiki Habyarimana

There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.

Robert Brault

Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty

Cucuk Espe

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Helen Bevington

My writings are the mirror of my soul and the dance of my mind.

Debasish Mridha

The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

We are inspired by divine power to write.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Men feel about sex the way vampires feel about blood. They don't just like it, they crave it. That's why vampire stories always have strong sexual undercurrents. A vampire's hunger is simply a metaphor for a man's lust.

Oliver Markus Malloy

Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.

Sara Sheridan

And I thought Ereaders could not become any more dreadful.

S.A. Tawks

Poetry keeps mein a highly drunken stateof divinity.

Sanober Khan

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Ernest Hemingway

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

Annie Dillard

If you want to be a successful writer you have to put your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard and put words on the page. Even shitty words are better than no words. You can go back and fix them later.

Liliana Hart

We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Beautiful publishers say beautiful things and then We're sorry, but no... and then more beautiful things. It's a shit sandwich with branston pickle and melted gouda.I read it out loud to the kids. I stick it to the fridge with the others. Some writers do that because it turns their crank to have a Wall of Publishers Who Passed And Will Someday Regret It. I don't. Each one is, really and truly, a gift. We look at them and the boys and I talk about rejection, all kinds of it. Creative, karmic, romantic. Nothing works out until something does.

Kate Inglis

If you're not creating, you're disintegrating.

Tawny Lara

Let’s end the notion that ideas have no value unless they turn into a business or have some other practical use. Save them all in a beautiful book like Leonardo did. You might want to give them away someday, perhaps to someone who needs an idea. Or your great-great-grandchildren might love knowing what a fascinating mind you had. Or your biographer might be very happy after you’re gone.

Barbara Sher

When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Today almost everybody is a writer, the enormous publish button on blogs and websites begs you everywhere to click on it! And bam you are a writer. To hell with agents and publishing houses and rejection letters. Immortality for you is on the click of a mouth! We are advancing at the speed of light! You can become an author at 140 characters. To hell with long winding sentences and long hours of scratching the head, the immortals of today instantly get a "like" and they instantly enter the pantheon! They seat side by side Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, St Paul, Buddha, Martin Luther, Rousseau, Bangambiki…

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If I can write, who possibly can’t. Even drawing a line in the sand is writing

Bangambiki Habyarimana

If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word

Bangambiki Habyarimana

You can edit what you write. Why not edit what you say? If it hurts somebody, you can still offer an apology or withdraw your statements

Bangambiki Habyarimana

We write, not because we claim to know more than others, but perhaps because we want to know more than others. Writers are explorers

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

Don’t try to present your art by making other people read or hear or see or touch it; make them feel it. Wear your art like your heart on your sleeve and keep it alive by making people feel a little better. Feel a little lighter. Create art in order for yourself to become yourselfand let your very existence be your song, your poem, your story.Let your very identity be your book.Let the way people say your name sound like the sweetest melody.

Charlotte Eriksson

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Elin Hilderbrand

Early in 1967 Highsmith's agent told her why her books did not sell in paperback in America. It was, said Patricia Schartle Myrer, because they were 'too subtle', combined with the fact that none of her characters were likeable. 'Perhaps it is because I don't like anyone,' Highsmith replied. 'My last books may be about animals'.

Andrew Wilson

Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don’t have the fucking part in writing a book.

M.F. Moonzajer

You turn the lights on and off here and if you can’t sleep and want something to read there are books in the living room…” her voice broke off. “Wait. Can you read?”His chin took a slight tilt upward. “Aye,” Faolán replied, his voice cool, “in English, Gaelic, Latin, or French. My Welsh is a bit rusty, and I doona remember any of the Greek I was taught except for words not fit for a lady’s ears. I can also count all the way up to…” He looked down and wiggled his large bare toes, “…twenty.” – Faolán MacIntyre

Shannon MacLeod

Och, lass. Yer going to have to not do that.” Faolán exhaled. “Creeping up on a man is a dangerous thing, and I confess I’m jumpier than most. Yer feet are soft as a cat’s.”“I wasn’t creeping anywhere, I was going to make coffee and this is my house, I’ll creep anywhere I like,” Colleen muttered with a petulant scowl. “But I wasn’t creeping.

Shannon MacLeod

Food shouldn’t be that shade of green, lass.” – Faolán MacIntyre

Shannon MacLeod

Have the courage to walk in truth, the strength to love always, and the integrity to never stray away from doing so.

A.D. Posey

In order to protect their good names for posterity, many writers never wrote what they thought or the truth as it stood. That's why truth still lies hidden in matters of power, sex and religion. No wonder they chose to do so, many who dared paid with their heads

Bangambiki Habyarimana

Word-Power'Being stuck in my room,I've become a world traveler.If you wonder how...just guess how I've reached you right now

Munia Khan

No two persons can learn something and experience it in the same way.

Shannon L. Alder

If everyone took his pen and wrote just anything that came on his mind, we would greatly help researchers to understand how our minds work

Bangambiki Habyarimana

The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.

Criss Jami

Your life should reflect your heart.

A.D. Posey

Self-publishing a shitty book doesn't make you an author any more than singing in the shower makes you a rockstar or squeezing your pimple makes you a dermatologist.

Oliver Markus

The flower doth not worry, and the tree doth not waver.

A.D. Posey

The purpose of life is to become acquainted with the deepest recesses of a person’s own mind by reflecting upon what a person reads, witnesses, and personally experiences. Wisdom is a form of power. Lacking knowledge of the world and without comprehending the essence of humanity, we can never know the truth of our own being.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Ideas either age like fine wine or rot like potatoes over time.

Pawan Mishra

A writer can do without food for a few hours, but not without the sight of books.

Pawan Mishra

Writing a story is like going on a date—you will spoil it if you aren't living in the moment.

Pawan Mishra

1 2 Next

Writing Quotes

Related Topics