100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

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Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

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The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

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If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.

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Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

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A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

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I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

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I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

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For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

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All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

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The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

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Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

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A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

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Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

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Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

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Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

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Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

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No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....

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I write to find out what I'm talking about.

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Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

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The story is always better than your ability to write it.

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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

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If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

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Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

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Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

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A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

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I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

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Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain.

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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

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The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

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

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I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

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A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

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Remember to get the weather in your damn book--weather is very important.

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