Writing Quotes

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then f...

I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done but you d...

Fundamentally all writing is about the same thing: it's about dying about the brief flicker of tim...

We are all pencils in the hand of God.

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossibl...

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-wor...

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They ...

So here is why I write what I do: We all have futures. We all have pasts. We all have stories. And w...

In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.This is tr...

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus...

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you chan...

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and ...

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small...

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears ...

So there’s a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn’t about how ...

At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a deli...

Goals are dreams with a deadline.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than b...

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and ...

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratif...

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. So wr...

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its don...

It’s not that they’re small, the fair folk. Especially not the queen of them all, Mab of the flashin...

You have to finish things — that’s what you learn from, you learn by finishing things.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else ma...

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a...

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and wr...

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite lik...

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not m...

My very small part in WATCHMEN is that, every now and then, Alan would phone me: ''Neil, you're an e...

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are...

Start telling the stories that only you can tell. Because there will always be better writers than y...

When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stol...

It's a weird thing, writing.Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like loo...

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge,...

So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm n...

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vis...

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tol...

The best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth com...

I decided that a story was anything that I made up that kept the reader turning the pages or watchin...

If you only write when you’re inspired you may be a fairly decent poet, but you’ll never be a noveli...

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do wit

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a write...

You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don't read big, tolkien-esque fantasies. TOLKIEN didn't read big, tol...

I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and ...

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed t...

But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it.")

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervo...

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay t...

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

The best thing about writing fiction is that moment where the story catches fire and comes to life o...

I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work. Wh...

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vis...

Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always ri...

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now an...

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them...

When I was a boy, Ray Bradbury picked stories from his books of short stories he thought younger rea...

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your ideas?"

People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It take...

The irritating question they ask us -- us being writers -- is: "Where do you get your i

As we write we summon little demons.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were an allegory; that an author (who...

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things...

In Sarasota, Florida, Stephen King reminded me of the joy of just writing every day.

Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about...

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasion...

Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist. We do it for a hundred reasons. (Beca...

STRAUSS:Have you ever thought about putting those experiences into a book?RICHIE:I did decide to wri...

No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is be...

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country...

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest ...

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be...

That's the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look...

Funny + sad is what I'm pitching for, every time.

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying th...

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy mino...

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, ...

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out cl...

At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same...

If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.

and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabo...

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three p...

Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you ...

Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful ...

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if...

Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego.

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work for it spoils something at the root of the creati...

The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not d...

If a person is not talented enough to be a novelist, not smart enough to be a lawyer, and his hands ...

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the...

Beauty and truth may be attributes of good writing but if the writer deliberately aims at truth he...

Writing: I certainly do rewrite my central myth in every book and would never read or trust any wri...

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) i...