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Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.
- Sharon O'Brien
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
- Vladimir Nabakov
Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies.
- Terri Guillemets
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
- Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.
- Mignon McLaughlin
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
- English Professor (Name Unknown), Ohio University
Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we?
- Terri Guillemets
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
- Baltasar Gracián
An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners' names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
- Mignon McLaughlin
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
- Arthur Polotnik
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.
- Jack Dann
Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
- Melinda Haynes
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
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
- Gloria Steinem
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
- Brenda Ueland
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
- Emile Zola
Writing is only boring to the people who are boring themselves.
Anonymous
May I never grow to old to treasure 'once upon a time'.
- Anonymous
It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky on january. But, as any creative person will tell you, there are days when there's absolutely nothing sweeter than creating something from nothing.
- Richard Krzemien
The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.
- Raymond Chandler
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
- E. L. Doctorow
You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.
- Dorothy C. Fontana
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.
- John Irving
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
- Eugene Ionesco
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
- Thomas Jefferson
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. LeGuin
You may be able to take a break from writing, but you won't be able to take a break from being a writer.
- Stephen Leigh
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary - it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
- Somerset Maugham
There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
- Terry Pratchett
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.
- Jane Yolen
Curiosity has its own reason for existence. The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein
How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
- E. M. Forster
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
- Anais Nin
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
- Henry David Thoreau
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
- Mark Twain
Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.
- Ray Bradbury
You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.
- Neil Gaiman
The two most engaging powers of an author are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
- Samuel Johnson
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.
- Orson Scott Card
If you haven't got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you'll only have to throw away the first three pages.
- William Campbell Gault
When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.
- Albert Einstein
If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.
- Louis L’Amour
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
- Linus Pauling
I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.
- Philip Pullman
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
- George Bernard Shaw
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
- Woodrow Wilson
When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
- Otto von Bismarck
The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
- Tom Clancy
Why would anybody lie? The truth is always more colourful.
- Jerry Hall
Fiction is a lie, and good fiction is the truth inside the lie.
- Stephen King
It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
- William Faulkner
In nearly all good fiction, the basic - all but inescapable - plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, perhaps including his own doubts, and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw.
- John Gardner
We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.
- John Gardner
It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.
- L P. Hartley
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.
- Z.N. Hurston
In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?
- Roy H. Williams
Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us.
- Susan Wittig Albert
Storytelling is healing. As we reveal ourselves in story, we become aware of the continuing core of our lives under the fragmented surface of our experience. We become aware of the multifaceted, multichaptered ' I ' who is the storyteller. We can trace out the paradoxical and even contradictory versions of ourselves that we create for different occasions, different audiences... Most important, as we become aware of ourselves as storytellers, we realize that what we understand and imagine about ourselves is a story. And when we know all this, we can use our stories to heal and make ourselves whole.
- Susan Wittig Albert
I keep six honest serving men
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When
and How and Where and Who.
- Rudyard Kipling
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
- Philip Larkin
Readers, after all, are making the world with you. You give them the materials, but it's the readers who build that world in their own minds.
- Ursula Le Guin
The reader has certain rights. He bought your story. Think of this as an implicit contract. He's entitled to be entertained, instructed, amused; maybe all three. If he quits in the middle, or puts the book down feeling his time has been wasted, you're in violation.
- Larry Niven
Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write my books so when the reader gets to the end of a chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded!
- Sidney Sheldon
The main question to a novel is - did it amuse? Were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? Did you mistake eleven for ten? Were you too late to dress? And did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not – story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.
- Sydney Smith
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.
- Jean Sibelius
A critic is a man who knows the way but can't drive the car.
- Kenneth Tynan
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
- Isaac Asimov
You can't try to do things; you simply must do them.
- Ray Bradbury
Opportunity dances with those who are already on the dance floor.
- H. Jackson Brown Jr.
You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.
- Les Brown
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
- Henry Ford
Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.
- Benjamin Franklin
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
When one door of happiness closes another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
- Helen Keller
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
- Ursula K. Le Guin
No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice - your choice.
- Beth Mende Conny
Once we choose hope, everything is possible.
- Christopher Reeve
The future belongs to those who believe in their dreams.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.
- Marilyn vos Savant
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw
Don't let a single day go by without writing. Even if it's garbage, if garbage is all you can write, write it. Garbage eventually becomes compost with a little treatment.
- Anonymous
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
- Scott Adams
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
- Ursula K. LeGuin...on writing
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
- Larry Niven
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
- Woody Allen
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
- Reggie Leach
The only one who doesn't make mistakes is the one who doesn't do anything.
- V. I. Lenin
I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.
- Steve Martin
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.
- William Faulkner
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.
- Ernest Hemingway
I see the notion of talent as quite irrelevant. I see instead perseverance, application, industry, assiduity, will, will, will, desire, desire, desire.
- Gordon Lish
I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.
- Mother Teresa
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
- Ernest Hemingway
Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.
- Stephen Leacock
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
- W. Somerset Maugham
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.
- Theodor Adorno
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
- Graham Greene
The desire to write grows with writing.
- Desiderius Erasmus
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
- E. B. White
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
- Joyce Carol Oates
I like myself better when I'm writing regularly.
- Willie Nelson
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