Quotes on “writing”

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Chase your dreams until you catch them...and then dream, catch, and dream again!

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.

10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty.