Writing Quotes

Criss Jami

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

Jessamyn West

Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.

robert m drake

Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be.

Henry David Thoreau

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

robert m drake

A tamed woman will never leave her mark in the world.

Kurt Vonnegut

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Walter Mosley

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

Blaise Pascal

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."(Letter 16, 1657)

Gilles Deleuze

The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?

Compton Gage

If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.

Clive Barker

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

Amaka Imani Nkosazana

You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

Charles Slagle

The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.

Bernhard Schlink

At first I wanted to write our story in order to be free of it. But the memories wouldn’t come back for that. Then I realized our story was slipping away from me and I wanted to recapture it by writing, but that didn’t coax up the memories either. For the last few years I’ve left our story alone. I’ve made peace with it. And it came back, detail by detail and in such a fully rounded fashion, with its own direction and its own sense of completion, that it no longer makes me sad. What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.

D. Antoinette Foy

Take each day in your open palms and close your fists around it. This life is not done with you yet.

Nelson Algren

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop. ...It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand.

Compton Gage

If one million of you give assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one million of you are a million times guilty.

Compton Gage

If one thousand of you participate in the murder of one child, then one thousand of you are a thousand times guilty.

Compton Gage

No crime is a means to an end. No crime can be rationalized.

Sarah Rees Brennan

I don't trust men everybody likes. Being nice isn't the same as being good.

Amit Kalantri

Great losses are great lessons.

J.E. Seanachaí

Without living, how can you know? Without knowing, how can you speak?

Amit Kalantri

Health is hearty, health is harmony, health is happiness.

Amit Kalantri

The decision is your own voice, an opinion is the echo of someone else's voice.

Amit Kalantri

Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.

Amit Kalantri

Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.

Amit Kalantri

If you can't impress them with your argument, impress them with your actions.

Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

robert m drake

Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be.

robert m drake

She was broken, I think it’s because she loved too much and she was always blind to the fact that love too is sometimes broken.

Jeffrey McDaniel

There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.

Nikki Giovanni

and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it

robert m drake

You’re not a bad person, you’re just a little bit different and I’m a sucker for that.

Julia Quinn

I can't imagine a romance novel published today where the hero rapes the heroine and she falls in love with him.

Sanober Khan

i writebecauseit is the only wayi can reach you.

Sarah Wendell

If a person who is content with his life meets someone who makes everything just a little bit more challenging, who both fits and doesn't fit into his life and his routine, to quote Guy Fieri, it is On Like Donkey Kong: swing the rope, jump the barrel, and save the princess.

Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt)

My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees. However, this is not relevant to what is currently on my mind because it concerns sloths, whereas the Branwell Brontë piece of information concerns writers and feeling like death and doing things to prove they can be done, all of which are pertinent to my current situation to a degree that is, frankly, spooky.

Mohsin Hamid

We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.

Paulo Coelho

In a world where everyone struggles to survive whatever the cost, how could one judge those who decide to die?

robert m drake

She was broken from moment to moment, watching her world collide she felt lost inside herself. She fell apart for a passion that flamed beneath her. She waited and died a hundred times, it dripped from her pores. The moment she let go, she soared over the stillness like the star she was born to be.

robert m drake

It was never about the world being too big, it was more like she was too much for the world to handle.

robert m drake

Maybe I hope too much. Maybe I dream too much or maybe I love too much to just give up on you.

robert m drake

Excuse me, I feel interrupted and I think I've overdose from the idea of loving you.

Stephanie Skeem

Flowers don't tell, they show. That's the way good books should be too."--Stephanie Skeem. Author of Flotsam

E.B. White

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Roy Bennett

Dream big. Wake up. Take the first step into the unknown.

Sunshine Rodgers

I rebuke the devil's ploy to get her away from You, God. I rebuke depression, anxiety, and emotional turmoil and I replace it with Your comfort. Your love. Your presence. I rebuke the devil from gaining ground. I rebuke Pride from seeping in.

Jack London

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Eudora Welty

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ...

Charles Bukowski

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.