Writing Quotes - Page 24

Next to motherhood, I personally believe that being an author is the best job in the world.

You are your greatest product and behind every book lies an author who wrote it.

Writing is like painting. You sketch it, add colour, add depth and detail. You give it a final layer and then hang it proudly.

Kia Carrington-Russell

I write so others might contemplate things that are out of the ordinary. I write to make people feel—to cause laughter and tears and anger at injustice. I write so the world will imagine and wonder at crazy, incredible truths. I write to have a tiny bit of influence on a universal conscience.

Richelle E. Goodrich

To describe an emotion is to feel with words. To communicate a moment of existence is to bridge the eternal and the temporal with an intellectual engagement of body, soul, spirit, and mind. To write, therefore is to entangle the mysteries of the universe in a collection of words, a web of ideas, a single drop of ink on a page.

Charles M. Heyworth

But above all, an author must write passionately and edit passionately.

Paul Collins

Twitter is a serious writing distraction. As are grapefruits. The two have nothing else in common.

Richelle E. Goodrich

I read so I might live a thousand lives in a lifetime. I write to control the particulars in those lives.

Richelle E. Goodrich

Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.

Amy Poehler

Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him.

Albert Camus

I love being an author - its the first job I've ever had where I'm paid to daydream. Greig Beck

Greig Beck

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

Jonathan Heatt

Authors - trust in your vision.

V.M. Sawh

I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.

Ryan Lilly

In my world," said Posy, "authors write stories, and the characters do whatever the author tells them. It's not like this--the characters don't have minds and lives of their own.""How do you know this?" was Caris' surprising reply. The corner of her mouth turned up in a playful smile. "You do not see the characters when the pages of the book are shut. Is there never a time when you read a book for the second time and you notice something that you didn't remember from the first time? Or hear a story told, and every time it is told it grows and changes in the telling? Change is the nature of everything.

Ashlee Willis

He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything in life is a metaphor for everything in life." Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

The best thing about being an author is the unspoken approval to dream while awake.

Alex G. Zarate

Become a parent. Lose your autonomy, but gain the wondrous superpower of The Magic Kiss that instantly dries tears and makes the pain of boo-boos disappear.

Patricia V. Davis

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book AwardsHard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximise corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

Ursula K Le Guin

Don't analyse your muse too closely, if at all – she'll turn away.

David John Griffin

Just because you're breathing, doesn't mean you're alive.

Carew Papritz

Blank pages are like monsters that haunt my dreams until I feed them words.

V.M. Sawh

An undaunted author, is the one who will succeed. There is no misfortune, that can dim their optimism.

Mary Sage Nguyen

If you aren't polite when giving criticism you will come off as an awful person and if you aren't polite when receiving criticism you will come off as an awful person.

S.A. Tawks

The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell.

S.A. Tawks

They were completely alone on the long stretch of country road and there was no one else to share the moment with them.

S.A. Tawks

What compels me to write now is the same as all those years ago. It is the love of writing and storytelling, driven by a desire to escape.

Fennel Hudson

why do I sleep? Because I dream, and that is where I hear the best stories and find the hidden destinations of life.

Lori Kay

In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.

Erica Jong

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a vortex" as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace. Her "scribbling suit" consisted of a black woollen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow, into which she bundled her hair when the decks were cleared for action. This cap was a beacon to the inquiring eyes of her family, who during these periods kept their distance, merely popping in their heads semi-occasionally, to ask, with interest, "Does genius burn, Jo?" They did not always venture even to ask this question, but took an observation of the cap, and judged accordingly. If this expressive article of dress was drawn low upon the forehead, it was a sign that hard work was going on; in exciting moments it was pushed rakishly askew; and when despair seized the author it was plucked wholly off, and cast upon the floor. At such times the intruder silently withdrew; and not until the red bow was seen gayly erect upon the gifted brow, did any one dare address Jo.

Louisa May Alcott

Putting a piece of you in your protagonist adds depth and merges the worlds of fiction and reality.

Adam Steven Page

There's something about each of my books that I'm really proud of, and there's something about each of my books that I cringe over.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

Slartibartfast's study was a total mess, like the results of an explosion in a public library.

Douglas Adams

*Persistence is more important than perfection. If at first you don’t succeed, it doesn’t matter as long as you always try, try again; *Small improvements, made consistently, add up; *You cannot fail unless you quit. What most people call failures are merely unsuccessful experiments. Failures are bumps on the road as long as your story remains a work in progress; *You can always do better with what you already have - and often, it’s much smarter to find ways to do so than to invest time and money trying something entirely new as your next one sure thing; *And most importantly, being good doesn’t matter nearly as much as being slightly better than yesterday.

Johnny B. Truant

When you begin a new story, your job is to envision, to try to glimpse stuff that doesn't as yet exist. That's what writing is, going out to meet the ghosts of the future. Not out of the past, not the ones that are dead and buried. Ghosts of the future, those who don't exist yet.

Cédric Klapisch

I'm not just building a foundation or a house with the bricks people throw at me. I'm building entire worlds. it's called writing.

Tracy Millosovich

It’s like people immediately imagine me sitting in some gothic, sweeping castle in Edinburgh, a piece of fine bone china full of English tea next to my neat writing station. They think that my car, my purse, my everything was financed by my lucrative but somehow not too time consuming writing career. I’ve even had one guy ask me if my hand cramps at signings. While I wanted to give a snarky, “Yes, just like Tom Brady’s does,” I can’t pull off snarky. My sarcasm immediately goes into b**ch territory

Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

One of my favourite things about being an author is waking up knowing that there are worlds just waiting to be discovered and created.

C.S. Woolley

And I write novels!" chimed in the other cop. "Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!

Douglas Adams

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

Edward Gorey

For every writer, there is a challenge of time that is only magnified in the solitude of the work.

E. Obeng-Amoako Edmonds

To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!

David Maxwell

Writing places a person in the community of those imaginative spirits whom preceded their birth. Writing also connects a person with the intrepid spirits whom share the present as well as with those souls whom are not yet born.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Sometimes when I prepare to write, I feel the same sensation wash over me as if my toes were curling over the brink of a high cliff, my gaze peering downward into a dark pond, and I anxiously wonder, will the water prove deep enough? Will my words be satisfactory?

Richelle E. Goodrich

He could’ve penned a rendition of Moby Dick in Pig Latin and he wouldn’t have been the wiser.

Kelly Moran

A story only wants to be told. Don't stand in its way.

Aleks Canard

Yes I am aware of the rules. Yes I can totally see how I err the Queen.Yes it is this very fact of slaying her language.That gives my soul its melodies.

Malebo Sephodi

The biggest thing for aspiring writers I would say is that writing is hard work. You can’t sustain the fantasy that it should somehow be otherwise for you because you are more special or more committed than other aspiring writers. You aren’t sitting down to be entertained by the gods or to entertain yourself. At times it can be a thrill and it feels more like play, but we are easily deceived by whatever pleasures or rewards writing can offer. Exhilarating work is still work. Is it work, or is it play? And the answer is “yes.” Does it sometimes feel like it comes easily or naturally? Yes. But did it really come easily? No. Writing doesn’t offer the rhythmic endorphin hit you get scrolling down the screen clicking on memes. Are you up for the work it is going to take to become successful as a writer? It is going to be harder than you think. You are submitting to forces and to a process that you can’t fully control. There is maybe a tiny bit more control if you self-publish, and there is no shame in doing that, but even that is going to introduce hard work. Probably harder than you think. If my next novel can’t find a home, I’m not above self-publishing it in some capacity and then moving on to the next project.

Brian K. Friesen

I love writing, but I would be able to love it more if that love wasn’t motivated by fear of homelessness.

Jenny Trout

Where did the stereotypical image of the reclusive author in a bathrobe and slippers, indulging in vices and spending hours before a typewriter, even come from? I don't know about you, but most writers don't have the luxury of doing any of this. Otherwise we'd have no life experience and nothing to write about, anyway.

Rebecca McNutt

To master magical realism, one must make the real seem unreal but, more importantly, make the unreal seem real.

Kevin Ansbro

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote.

Jeffrey L. Staley

I wouldn’t say “art” as much as “virtue,” in the ancient Greek sense of “andreia” – manly action – or “arete,” excellence. In my experience, Resistance kicks in any time we try to move ourselves from a lower plane to a higher. In other words, when we try to align with the better parts of our nature. This move can be creative (art) or physical (athletics) or it can be ethical, moral or spiritual. Have you ever tried to meditate? I have and it kicks my butt every time. Spiritual stuff is hard! But so is making “cold calls” if you’re opening a new business. Somehow the principle is the same. We’re trying to overcome our natural laziness, selfishness, sloppiness, etc. So I wouldn’t say “art,” I’d say “virtue.

Steven Pressfield

I personally find that having a couple of projects going at once can be an aid to focus, refreshing my brain as I go back and forth between them – a book review and a novel at the same time, for example. But I’ve seen that writers who are starting out sometimes throw their energy in so many different directions that they can never finish any of the projects, much less all of them.To me a good test is this: what do you like to read? What kind of book moves and affects you the most? Is it the memoir, the novel, the long poem-collection? Personally, I find myself most immersed in the novel, and that’s why I write them – they have the most magic for me. The joy of self-expression is exhilarating, but ultimately choosing one venue for it can make your work much better – and same for your chances of actually finishing something.

Charles Finch

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

Philip Zaleski

[T]he success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, "What are my big scenes?" and then get every drop of juice out of

P.G. Wodehouse

Writing a novel is like traveling the universe on foot.

Dennis R. Miller

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel, constantly, but only in my brain.

Andrew Shaffer

Most times, my mind is just an ongoing, present-tense, first-person monologue. It's like I'm writing a novel.

Andrew Shaffer

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Writing Quotes - Page 24

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