150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

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.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

With writing, we have second chances.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.

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

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

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

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

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

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

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.

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.

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.

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.