Writing Process Quotes

“I’ve always loved the night, when everyone else is asleep and the world is all mine. It’s quiet and dark—the perfect time for creativity.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Porcelain Utopia

“I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.”
― James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack

“But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?”
― Stephen King, Everything's Eventual

“In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.

[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938]”
― Mikhail Bulgakov

“... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Writing starts with living.”
― L. L. Barkat, Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing

“Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.”
― Katerina Stoykova Klemer

“You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.”
― Jenny Hubbard, Paper Covers Rock

“When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.”
― Richard B. Knight

“I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.”
― Stephen King

“Don't over edit. Don't second-guess yourself, or your ideas. Just write. Write every day, and keep at it. Don't get discouraged with the rejections. Tape them up on your office wall, to remind you of all the hard work you put in when you finally start getting published! It's all about persistence and passion. And have fun with it. Don't forget to have fun.”
― Heather Grace Stewart

“Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats. Also, there is a social or sociological drift--rather than toward the hard sciences, the overall impression is childish but interesting.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick

“Today’s tangents will become tomorrow’s arcs, and unforeseen connections will tie up your loose ends in a way that will make you want to slap your head and holler at your accidental brilliance.”
― Chris Baty

“Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.”
― Stewart Stafford

“If a writer can seek help from a family member, friend, professional editor, translator, or ghost‑writer to refine, reshape, or even rewrite their work without losing authorship, then denying that same right when using AI is an unacceptable double standard!”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it—and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But—I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.
And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I display my truth through pen and curtain. Yvonne Padmos. Playwright The freedom of passion”
― Yvonne Padmos

“It's good that I don't know how to write, that's how I do my best writing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Unlike photography, writing has always been a ruthless and unrelenting teacher, a demanding lover, a sparring partner that leaves me bruised and scarred, but the satisfaction I’ve always gained from completing a writing project is unmatched. Not much else compares.”
― Tieshka K Smith, Compositions of Black Joy: A Visual Chronicle of the Philadelphia Juneteenth Festival

“Writing is my life, my mirror my only friend." – short movie My Mirror, My Only Echo”
― Yvonne Padmos

“The pen is an extension of my anatomy.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Don't write to recount the pain. Write to reclaim the joy.”
― Jen Knox, We Arrive Uninvited

“I know an unhappy person who can’t write anything unless he’s sitting at his desk in his room with his laptop. [...] No matter what spectacular places he visited, he couldn’t enjoy himself because he had only his own room in mind. He was the happiest when he was sitting at his desk in his room, traveling with his laptop. In the end, he became someone who couldn’t come out of his room all his life. He did write, of course, but he couldn’t be a world-renowned novelist. He could write things that were only as big as the room in which he stayed.”
― Jang Eun-Jin, No One Writes Back

“Writing freely clears the noise and lets the truth come through.”
― Priscilla Zorrilla

“How do I know what I think, until I see what I've written?”
― Peter Vogel

“Inner and outer worlds can never be reconciled by a poet, nor should they be. However, traveling between these two, and trying to express the experience in words, is something I'm grateful to have spent my life doing”
― Miriam Sagan, What Solitude Sees in Me: Uncollected Poems 1976-2023

“A great writer always, mostly, needs to do something that has nothing to do with writing, or so it seems, but that thing they are involved with is the very place in which they write; while farming, a poet is writing. Writers go to parties, great writers do something else.”
― Jamaica Kincaid, Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974–

“I don't write to impress. I write to live. To breathe through the ache, to process the unbearable, to carve light into memory. My pen is my spine, my page the heartbeat. I write to exist wholly; raw, real, and still rising.”
― Vennie Kocsis

“I think perhaps you don't finish writing a book. You stop writing it.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“It was then that I understood something essential: once a book is published, it no longer belongs to you.
It takes on a life of its own.
It begins to walk on its own legs, like a child who has chosen a direction. And most of all, no reader simply reads it — they see themselves reflected in it. And what they see — or what they refuse to see — depends far more on them than on you.”
― Pierenrico Gottero, The Island of What Could Have Been: Back to the Middle Lands