Writing Quotes
Quotes about Writing
702 quotes
- “The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every...” — Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales Of Childhood
- “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity ...” — Anne Lamott
- “Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at ...” — Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry And Other Stories
- “Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate...” — Dr. Seuss
- “I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is p...” — J.r.r. Tolkien
- “Because even among contrarians, I’m a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do...” — Jarod Kintz, I Should Have Renamed This
- “I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I re...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating c...” — Paul Rudnick
- “Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination ...” — Robert Mckee
- “Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when sh...” — Nicole Krauss
- “But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something t...” — Charlotte Brontë
- “I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be...” — Anne Brontë, The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall
- “Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsell...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is,...” — Joyce Carol Oates
- “Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it be...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you li...” — Neil Gaiman
- “The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He ...” — Roald Dahl
- “And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myse...” — Andre Dubus Iii, Townie
- “This is what I believe to be the progress of a writer. You write 10 things, of which one of them will be great. You then...” — Jarod Kintz, At Even One Penny, This Book Would Be Overpriced. In Fact, Free Is Too Expensive, Because You'd Still Waste Time By Reading It.
- “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory larg...” — Flannery O'connor, Mystery And Manners: Occasional Prose
- “Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get bett...” — Laura Kasischke
- “She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything tha...” — Sándor Márai, Embers
- “From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly t...” — Ray Bradbury
- “I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to ...” — Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
- “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find bea...” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray
- “A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All thi...” — Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-four Conversations With Borges: Interviews By Roberto Alifano
- “It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to le...” — Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
- “In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And m...” — Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet
- “A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they m...” — H.p. Lovecraft
- “Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down t...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “Ideas come at any moment -- except when you demand them. Most ideas come while I'm physically active, at the gym, with f...” — Chuck Palahniuk
- “Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?""The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right n...” — Aaron Sorkin
- “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into ...” — Don Delillo
- “To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings n...” — Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation
- “A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying...” — Virginia Woolf, Orlando
- “Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him."Which utterly mi...” — Warren Ellis
- “I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thi...” — Richard Bausch
- “Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never st...” — Jennifer Weiner
- “You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because...” — Junot Díaz
- “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however di...” — Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
- “You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like t...” — Cornelia Funke, Inkheart
- “So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the tel...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. ...” — Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings
- “I sat down and tried to write a story."Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them...” — Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower
- “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the tru...” — Anne Lamott
- “Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day...” — Timothy Egan
- “Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a l...” — Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- “Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, ...” — Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
- “Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the c...” — Hugh Macleod, Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys To Creativity
- “A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertain...” — Tim O'brien