Writing-life Quotes

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.

To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your ...

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both con...

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to ...

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique...

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does thing...

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a...

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I'm not asking you to be politically corre...

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should pr...

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tool...

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbere...

For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room...

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I w...

When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thi...

Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when ...

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the read...

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I sha...

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that neede...

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel...

Q: Where and when do you do your writing? A: Any small room with no natural light will do. As for wh...

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some ...

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certai...

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…su...

You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by ex...

Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary...

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue a...

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you ...

When people shine a little light on their monster, we find out how similar most of our monsters are.

All good writers write [terrible first drafts.] This is how they end up with good second drafts and ...

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wrac...

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be un...

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing ...

Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, th...

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and wri...

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own ...

Pain engraves a deeper memory.

For me, writing was the only way out.

The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is b...

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex an...

One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right a...

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing onesel...

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery prob...

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in t...

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do ...

I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn...

I have wrought my simple planIf I give one hour of joyTo the boy who’s half a man,Or the man who’s h...

My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now....

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense ...

At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not kn...

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.