100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

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The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

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There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.

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To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

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The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

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The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

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We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

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A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.

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Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

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Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

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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 have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

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What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

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Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

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I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

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Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

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Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

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This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

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We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

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The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

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If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

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I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

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The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

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True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

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One should use common words to say uncommon things

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I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

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Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

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Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

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You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

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A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

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I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

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Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

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We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

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A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

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There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.

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The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

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Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

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A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

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