100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.

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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

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The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

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Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

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You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

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I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

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The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

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You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

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Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

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

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Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

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The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

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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.

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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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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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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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With writing, we have second chances.

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People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.

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You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

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I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

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Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

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Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

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Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

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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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I don't think all writers are sad, she said.I think it's the other way around—all sad people write.

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Write about the emotions you fear the most.

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Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

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A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

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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.

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

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I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet.

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Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

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A word after a word after a word is power.

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Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

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Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

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The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

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...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

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

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