Writing-life Quotes

And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the gl...

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least ...

I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore an...

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat...

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat...

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic ...

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it...

Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey ...

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are...

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. M...

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing....

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was try...

You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting ...

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there wa...

No art ever came out of not risking your neck.

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard...

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference betwe...

I remember, for instance, the first time I went to the great palace of Versailles outside Paris and ...

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to aba...

In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, ...

‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to ever...

I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straig...

One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.

A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.

Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going ou...

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere ...

Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly shar...

As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense th...

...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling hims...

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something...

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more com...

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if ...

And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.

Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer t...

...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.

...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place fro...

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determi...

Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it ...

Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as creator but seldom see "creator" as the...

Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter...

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself a...

America takes her writers too seriously.

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behi...

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can...

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cel...

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a ...

The story comes, and it is pure story. That's all I set out to write. But I don't believe that we ca...

I'm working on my own life story. I don't mean I'm putting it together; no, I'm taking it apart. If ...

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a...

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses ...

But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal ...

But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.

I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could hav...

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought co...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is th...

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to acce...

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...

If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too...

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

Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts...

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

I do enjoy writing, and I hope someone gets something interesting out of this book. I already have. ...

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

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

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

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

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

Don’t ask for advice too much. Go with you, as gritty as that might be at times.

People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really ne...

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

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

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any m...

Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and th...

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

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

Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that...

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

...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's...

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, ...

In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written b...

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relations...

You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.