Writing Quotes

This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yours...

If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”"Se ...

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling com...

Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its root...

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it...

So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known,...

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personal...

Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much t...

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You migh...

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a c...

We are as much informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as by what he originates.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

It makes a great difference in the force of a sentence whether a man be behind it or no.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

Books are for nothing but to inspire

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightni...

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always t...

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Futur...

Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electri...

Writing keeps death at bay. Every book I write is a triumph over death. ... If we did not know we’d ...

I believe in having fun first, and along the way, if you teach people, if you influence people, well...

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought...

Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on thei...

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than ...

Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-...

Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Work. Don't Think. Relax.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning ...

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If no...

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like...

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned ...

Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stor...

Create a character with an obsession, then follow.

When a man talks from the heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's fathe...

Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape he...

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-litera...

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when tr...

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or...

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the...

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your be...

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I s...

Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind. They all knew the joy o...

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a write...

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need ...

I have a sense of exile from thought, a nostalgia of the quiet room and balanced mind. I am a writer...

At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution once revealed must se...

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge t...

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows ...

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication betw...

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers j...

How did writing come to me? Like bird’s down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in th...

It is impossible for any Sherlock Holmes story not to have at least one marvelous

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promise...

I have to declare in all candor that no one interested in being published in our time can afford to ...

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding ...

Real mystery - the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book - was to them a thing to disma...

Finally I do like best of all stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace o...

For writers - even sportswriters - bad news is always easier than good, since it is, after all, more...

It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, ...

I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with...

A critic is a man created to praise greater men than himself, but he is never able to find them.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you...

God, how impossible life is without money. Nothing can ever overcome it, it's everything when it's a...

God help me, he thought. God help all us poor wretches who could create and find we must lose our he...

Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else.A...

The drama of the essay is the way the public life intersects with my personal and private life. It's...

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don'...

At the risk of appearing disingenuous, I don't really think of myself as 'writing humor.' I'm simply...

I could have made money this way, and perhaps amused myself writing code. But I knew that at the end...

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enou...

How can you write if you can't cry?

George was getting alot of independence for himself in those days. He was writing more, and wanted t...

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot c...

Writers will happen in the best of families.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force...

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master e...

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours ...

The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fa...

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afte...

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most...

A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still kee...

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up bec...

Critics! Appalled I ventured on the name.Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.

All Poets are mad.

A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a ho...