150+ Writing Quotes Every Author Needs to Read Now

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

Write what should not be forgotten.

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

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.

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

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

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

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

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.

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?