“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams,
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou
“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger,
“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
― Maya Angelou
“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King
“Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
― Mark Twain
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf,
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
― Mark Twain,
“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde,
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac,
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury,
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”
― Stephen King
“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner
“History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.”
― Winston Churchill
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King,
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.”
― Charles Dickens,
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King,
“Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
― Stephen King
“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”
― Stephen King,
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”
― Virginia Woolf
“We live and breathe words. .... It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt--I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamt. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted--and then I realized that truly I just wanted you.”
― Cassandra Clare,
“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”
― Sylvia Plath,
“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.”
― Isaac Asimov
“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of. ”
― Joss Whedon
“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.”
― Neil Gaiman
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury
“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King,
“So what? All writers are lunatics!”
― Cornelia Funke,
“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
― Toni Morrison,
“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut,
“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.”
― Joss Whedon
“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.”
― Ellen DeGeneres,
“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain
“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.”
― Anaïs Nin
“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James A.
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck
“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham
“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.”
― Ishmael Reed,
“A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”
― Anthony Trollope
“you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
― Stephen King,
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”
― Anaïs Nin
“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
― Jack London
“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
“I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral.”
― Jarod Kintz,
“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
“The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
― Thomas Mann,
“Write what should not be forgotten.”
― Isabel Allende
“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King
“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
― Stephen King,
“By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...”
― Brandon Sanderson,
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
― Stephen King
“You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending.”
― Julia Quinn
“When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time. ”
― Lady Gaga
“A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.”
― Joseph Conrad,
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”
― Thomas Jefferson
“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called.
”
― Jarod Kintz,
“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White
“Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.”
― Frank Zappa,
“I want to gather up all the ink cartridges in the universe, because somewhere, mixed in with all that ink, is the next great American novel. And I’d love nothing more than to drink it.”
― Jarod Kintz,
“I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q.”
― Jarod Kintz,
“I wish my stove came with a Save As button like Word has. That way I could experiment with my cooking and not fear ruining my dinner.
”
― Jarod Kintz
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E. L. Doctorow
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
― W. Somerset Maugham
“Tears are words that need to be written.”
― Paulo Coelho
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
― Ray Bradbury
“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”
― Stephen King,
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
― Jules Renard
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell
“When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.”
― Neil Gaiman
“Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.”
― Hermann Hesse
“I hate writing, I love having written.”
― Dorothy Parker
“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”
― Dylan Thomas
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
― Ernest Hemingway
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton,
“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.”
― Frank Herbert
“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”
― Margaret Atwood
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood,
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan
“You can fix anything but a blank page.”
― Nora Roberts
“Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.”
― Jennifer Weiner
“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.”
― Alice Walker
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott,
“I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.”
― Philip Pullman
“Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”
― J.D. Salinger,
“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“I want to write the Boston Marathon of run-on sentences. And since it'll be so long, I'll replace all the commas with the word Gatorade, to help push people through it.”
― Jarod Kintz
“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood
“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor,
“I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku.”
― Jarod Kintz,
“I want to write a poem about "Truth," "Honor," "Dignity," and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it.”
― Jarod Kintz
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Aldous Huxley,
“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka
“It has often been said
there’s so much to be read,
you never can cram
all those words in your head.
So the writer who breeds
more words than he needs
is making a chore
for the reader who reads.
That's why my belief is
the briefer the brief is,
the greater the sigh
of the reader's relief is.
And that's why your books
have such power and strength.
You publish with shorth!
(Shorth is better than length.)”
― Dr. Seuss
“Cynics are simply thwarted romantics.”
― William Goldman,
“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.”
― Christopher Hitchens
“great writers are indecent people
they live unfairly
saving the best part for paper.
good human beings save the world
so that bastards like me can keep creating art,
become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead
it means I made it.”
― Charles Bukowski,
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”
― William Wordsworth
“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
― Stephen King,
“A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it”
― Roald Dahl
“All I need is a sheet of paper
and something to write with, and then
I can turn the world upside down.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.”
― Louisa May Alcott,
“The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”
― Chuck Palahniuk
“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”
― Stephen King,
“When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.”
― Stephen King
“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”
― Mark Twain,
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”
― Natalie Goldberg,
“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
― Virginia Woolf,
“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
― Anne Lamott,
“There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”
― L.M. Montgomery,
“I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.”
― Philip Pullman
“Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire.
(The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.)"
(Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme, 1738)”
― Voltaire
“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valéry
“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?”
― George Orwell,
“I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.”
― Peter De Vries
“You are what you write.”
― Helvy Tiana Rosa,
“Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.”
― Don Roff
“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
(Letter 16, 1657)”
― Blaise Pascal,
“I’m trying to translate what my cat says and put it in a book, but how many homonyms are there for meow?
”
― Jarod Kintz
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