Writing Quotes

I don’t know if you have had the same experience, but the snag I always come up against when I’m tel...

It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hou...

...there was practically one handwriting common to the whole school when it came to writing lines. I...

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular mess...

The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and...

I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came ...

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her....

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, i...

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by...

If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you...

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while somethin...

But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some...

The problem with a lot of people who read only literary fiction is that they assume fantasy is just ...

Fantasy is my favorite genre for reading and writing. We have more options than anyone else, and the...

A writer or any artist can’t expect to be embraced by the people. I've done records where it seemed ...

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be s...

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I neve...

It ain't so easy writing about nothin

And then I walked out, straight through the twilight, treading the beaten earth. There were no dust ...

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into t...

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour a...

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was...

I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now ...

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of m...

To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books - this ove...

Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his ...

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

If I didn't have writing, I'd be running down the street hurling grenades in people's faces.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading...

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and ...

I have spent my life on the road waking in a pleasant, or not so pleasant hotel, and setting off eve...

Writing was in my mind from the time I was in high school, but more, the idea that I would be a doct...

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost always an...

The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye se...

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and pa...

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is ...

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliv...

Tears are words that need to be written.

Simply having the courage to say senseless things made me euphoric. I was free, with no need to seek...

Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.

Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story betwe...

if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.

In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those who deci...

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get...

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about...

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the pl...

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; ...

DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must b...

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. Howe...

The writing of fantasy is best left to those who have nothing better to do, as is indicated by the f...

After the third [San Miguel], I am likely to announce that all writing is fantasy anyway: that to se...

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reig...

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and ...

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by b...

You know, the way I feel, if I read a science fiction book by a new writer which is a lot better tha...

They know a million tricks, those novelists. Take Doctor Goebbels; that's how he started out, writin...

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't ...

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequ...

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. ...

It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right t...

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. W...

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumber...

I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to e...

Fritz had to stop himself from interrupting when Karl spoke about the difficulty of working. Stories...

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one tra...

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere t...

Don't judge it. Just write it. Don't judge it. It's not for you to judge it.Interview in Esquire Mag...

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

There is his religion of art, my young successor: rejecting life! Not living is what he makes his be...

Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.

Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.

Is it foolish to care for non-existent folk?Then, leave me to my foolishness.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a c...

To me, movies and music go hand in hand. When I'm writing a script, one of the first things I do is ...

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtr...

As a writer, I demand the right to write any character in the world that I want to write. I demand t...

If you can quit, then quit. If you can't quit, you're a writer.

CHAPTER 2: INGLOURIOUS BASTERDSALDO THE APACHEMy name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I'm putting together a s...

I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, ...

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being o...

How can I expect readers to know who I am if I do not tell them about my family, my friends, the rel...

I write not for the sake of glory. Not for the sake of fame. Not of the sake of success. But for the...

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper...

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help...