100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

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You don’t make art out of good intentions.

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I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

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If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

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The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

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A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

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

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Realism can break a writer's heart.

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

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

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

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It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

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

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

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All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

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Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

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Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

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

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Write what should not be forgotten.

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

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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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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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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

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

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

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

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

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