Writing Quotes

“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” -- Barry Lopez

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." -- Kurt Vonnegut

“Australian Aborigines say that the big stories—the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life—are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting their prey in the bush.” -- Robert Moss

"My favourite piece of advice [on writing a book]. . . came from the Australian novelist, Elliot Perlman. What would he say to anyone who wanted to write a novel? He paused, then replied firmly, 'Think what you are prepared to sacrifice.' -- Louise Doughty

"The writer is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures for the purpose of improvement . . . Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, and for courage, compassion and love." -- John Steinbeck

"Fiction is a lie. Good fiction is the truth in a lie." -- Stephen King

"This race and this country and this life produced me . . . I shall express myself as I am." -- James Joyce

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that it all happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstacy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer." -- Ernest Hemingway

"The only thing worth writing about is the conflict in the human heart." -- William Faulkner

"One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating." ~Niyi Osundare

"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any." ~Russell Baker

“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” -- Marc Chagall

“The great thing is to last and get your work done, and see and hear and understand and write when there is something that you know and not before and not too damn much afterwards.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.” -- F Scott Fitzgerald

"The writer must write what he has to say, not speak it."
~ Ernest Hemingway (acceptance speech for the Nobel Price, 1954)

"Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer." ~Barbara Kingsolver

"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." ~Charles Peguy

"Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted." ~Jules Renard

'I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.' -- Joan Didion

‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ -- E M Forster

“If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” -- Toni Morrison

"No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one." ~Robert Byrne

"Writing is hard work and bad for the health." ~Author unknown

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~E. L. Doctorow

'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' -- Gustave Flaubert

“If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.” ~Lord Byron

"Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered." ~J. Michael Straczynski

"Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it." ~Jesse Stuart

"The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism." ~ James Jones

"A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down." ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

"The end of our exploring will be to arrive at where we started, and to know the place for the first time." -- T S Eliot

"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to." ~Somerset Maugham

“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.” -E. L. Doctorow

"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else." ~Gloria Steinem

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." ~Thomas Mann

"A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing." ~Eugene Ionesco

"Through joy and through sorrow, I wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I wrote. Through good report and through ill report, I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say." ~Edgar A. Poe

"I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write." ~P. G. Wodehouse

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite." ~G. K. Chesterton

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." ~Howard Aiken

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” -- F Scott Fitzgerald

"I am large, I contain multitudes." -- Walt Whitman

"This is the tale I pray the divine Muse to unfold to us. Begin it, goddess, at whatever point you will." -- Homer

"Fitzgerald never got rid of anything; the ghosts of his adolescence, the failures of his youth, the doubts of his maturity plagued him to the end. He was supremely a part of the world he described, so much a part that he made himself its king and then, when he saw it begin to crumble, he crumbled with it and led it to death." ~John Aldridge

"'Writing takes so much effort, with such little promise of result or reward, that it must necessarily be a labour of love bordering on madness." ~Steven Saylor

"A book is so much a part of oneself that in delivering it to the public one feels as if one were pushing one’s own child out into the traffic." ~Quentin Bell

"Every time I peer into [my 13-volume Oxford English Dictionary}, which is several times a day, I think: All the words I'll ever need are here; the only thing I have to do is get them out in the right order." -- Andrew Motion

"Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!" ~Edna Ferber

"When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on." ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms; the great devotions; and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody; in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all." ~James Baldwin

"It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair." ~ Maureen Howard

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.” ~Unknown

"If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light. If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you." - Henry Rollins

"As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly." - Paul Rudnick

"We must not get beaten down by those who choose to simply take up space on this planet." - Lew Hunter

"Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing and it becomes chronic in their sick minds." - Juvenal (AD 60-130)

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges." - Ernest Hemingway

"Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public." ~ Winston Churchill

"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing." ~ Ernest Hemingway (acceptance speech for the Nobel Price, 1954)

"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer." ~ Doris Lessing

"The most solid advice . . . for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." ~ William Saroyan

"An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself." ~ Irwin Shaw

"One of the least impressive liberties is the liberty to starve. This particular liberty is freely accorded to authors." ~ Lord Goodman

"Writing is not an artform, it is a punishment from God." ~ Fran Lebowitz

"Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none." ~ Jules Renard

"Editing is the same as quarreling with writers - same thing exactly." ~ Harold Ross

"Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves." ~ Paul Theroux

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and the lightening bug." ~ Mark Twain

"Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armour and attacked a hot fudge sunday." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

'No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place.' -- Isaac Babel

"I feel like I'm cheating on my lover, sneaking off to fondle the keyboard and share secret thoughts with all manner of lurking strangers hidden from sight -- like whispering in the dark or writing blind in a crowded bar."-- MizMax

“Oh! dreadful is the check - intense the agony - / When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; / When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; / The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.” ~ Emily Bronte

'It's true that writing is a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.’ -- Anne Tyler

“Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,/ How could I seek the empty world again?” ~ Emily Bronte

"Black words on a white page are the soul laid bare." -- Guy de Maupassant

"How can you write if you can't cry?" -- Ring Lardner

“The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender.” ~ Emil Ludwig

“Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds” ~ Douglas Adams

“As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"” -- Ellen Glasgow

‘Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.’ -- Tom Clancy

"As a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness." -- Ursula Le Guin

“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” -- William Wordsworth