100+ Writing Quotes & Sayings

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.

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Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

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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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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

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Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

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If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

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Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

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Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

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Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

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Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

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When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.

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This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

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Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

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Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

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and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it

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I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

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Good fiction creates its own reality.

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You can fix anything but a blank page.

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You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

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First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.

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You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

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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.

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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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Writing is the geometry of the soul.

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When I’m writing my own stuff, it’s like swimming upstream. Or … falling down a cliff and grabbing at branches, trying to invent the branches as I fall.

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Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

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Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

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A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

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

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

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You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

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Writers will happen in the best of families.

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The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

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It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

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In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

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I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

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A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

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