100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

• 1 Like
• Writing

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.

• 1 Like
• Writing

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

• 1 Like
• Writing

I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.

• 1 Like
• Writing

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

• 1 Like
• Writing

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

• 1 Like
• Writing

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

• 1 Like
• Writing

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

• 1 Like
• Writing

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.

• 1 Like
• Writing

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

• 1 Like
• Writing

it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell.

• 1 Like
• Writing

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

• 1 Like
• Writing

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

• 1 Like
• Writing

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

• 1 Like
• Writing

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

• 1 Like
• Writing

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

• 1 Like
• Writing

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

• 1 Like
• Writing

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

• 1 Like
• Writing

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

• 1 Like
• Writing

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

• 1 Like
• Writing

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

• 1 Like
• Writing

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

• 1 Like
• Writing

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

• 1 Like
• Writing

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge."

• 1 Like
• Writing

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

• 1 Like
• Writing

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

• 1 Like
• Writing

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

• 1 Like
• Writing

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Write about the emotions you fear the most.

• 1 Like
• Writing

Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

• 1 Like
• Writing

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

• 1 Like
• Writing

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.

• 1 Like
• Writing