Writing Quotes

“I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.”
― Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

“There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it; a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly; you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks; they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall...
And fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful; if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”
― Machado de Assis, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas

“Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked.
'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.”
― Jean Genet

“One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?"

[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)]”
― Ken Kesey

“The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.”
― Alexei Maxim Russell

“Writing is a gift to both the writer and the reader.”
― Cheryl Alleway

“If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”
― George Orwell

“When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic."

[As quoted on WritersServices, 6 March 2012]”
― Susanna Clarke

“I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms.”
― Alistair Cross

“Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.  

Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.  

Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.  

Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues. 

A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“Let All Your Life’s Experiences Lead To More Writing & Encourage More Reading..!”
― Sujit Lalwani, Life Simplified!

“You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”
― Flaubert

“Sometimes the body gets out of bed an hour before the brain.”
― Peter James West

“He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love.

You think?

I do.

It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever.

You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room.

That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.”
― Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her

“For some young artists, it can take a bit of time to discover which tools (which medium, or genre, or career pathway) will truly suit them best. For me, although many different art forms attract me, the tools that I find most natural and comfortable are language and oil paint; I've also learned that as someone with a limited number of spoons it's best to keep my toolbox clean and simple. My husband, by contrast, thrives with a toolbox absolutely crowded to bursting, working with language, voice, musical instruments, puppets, masks animated on a theater stage, computer and video imagery, and half a dozen other things besides, no one of these tools more important than the others, and all somehow working together. For other artists, the tools at hand might be needles and thread; or a jeweller's torch; or a rack of cooking spices; or the time to shape a young child's day....

To me, it's all art, inside the studio and out. At least it is if we approach our lives that way.”
― Terri Windling

“The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.”
― Vera Nazarian

“I think maybe today a poem I hope
after breakfast I start trying
pulling it out of my own gut
mostly by force”
― John Thomas Idlet (John Thomas), Epopoeia And the Decay of Satire

“I do so much writing. But so much of it never goes anywhere, never sees any light of day. I suppose that's like gardening in the basement. I don't publish so much of what I write. I just seem to plow it back into the soil of what I write after it, rewriting and rewriting, thinking that somehow it gets better after the fifty-second-time around. I need to learn to abandon my writing. To let go of it. Dispose of it, like tissue.”
― J.R. Tompkins

“Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“i live on my books. on my writings, i live on my royalties: the percentage an author recieves on each sold copy. and i am proud of it. i am so even though such percentage is small or i should say irrelevant.”
― Oriana Fallaci

“Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)”
― Christopher Lehman

“A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.”
― John Dufresne, No Regrets, Coyote

“Not all of Derrida's writing is to everyone's taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: 'What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this "I" who speaks of speaking?”
― Terry Eagleton

“The Fiction defense. Sometimes I just need to use it.”
― C. Kennedy

“The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms

“I don't think there's any deep psychological reason. It isn't comparable, say, to America's involvement with Vietnam and the emotional scars that that has left behind. A much more cogent way of looking at it is that the British have suddenly realized that they have their own equivalent of the perennial western. We have an immense, extremely colorful, diverse history of the empire, and I think people are just beginning to realize that there are jolly good stories there for the telling.”
― Valerie Fitzgerald

“If you don't write, then read.”
― Sylvia L'Namira