100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

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Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

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Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

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A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

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Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

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The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

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Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

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It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

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I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

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That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

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No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

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Realism can break a writer's heart.

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Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

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I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe.

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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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10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

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My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

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She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

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

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Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

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I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

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Writers will happen in the best of families.

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The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

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Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

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Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

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A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

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I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

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The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

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A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

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You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

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If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

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In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

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

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Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

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Writing is the geometry of the soul.

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A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it

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A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

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