100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

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

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You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

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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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All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

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The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

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What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

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Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

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A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

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Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

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

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Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

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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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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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We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

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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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If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

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The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering.

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An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

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Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

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

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One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

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After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

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Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

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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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Never put off writing until you are better at it.

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I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

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You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

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Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

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The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

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Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

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

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The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

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Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

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If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

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We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.

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You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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Write what should not be forgotten.

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I have spent a good many years since

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You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

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