The Writing Life Quotes
Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.
Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.
As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.
I’m much more than a writer – I’m someone who puts different words together in an interesting way.
Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.
Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.
...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.
He said: I don't like to read. And I said, honey, you haven't found the right girl.
One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.
Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.
Write and keep writing, not because people will like it, but because someone may get a kick out of thrashing your book.
Don’t ask for advice too much. Go with you, as gritty as that might be at times.
In her spare time she scribbled her thoughts, wishes and dreams, life and times. It kept her sane despite her loneliness.
Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.
Writing is my joy, is my comfort zone, it strengthens my feeble knees and it frees my troubled heart.
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.
Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...
...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians, ' he said, 'but that doesn't mean they can't behave like decent human beings.
If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.
The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
A 15-minute gap in your day is plenty of time to write and read, but not if you check your email first.
So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.
I refuse to give up when things go wrong because there is always a sliver lining behind the cloud.
I don't think you can reach your potential as a writer unless you're a passionate reader, AND read passionately.
...nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
...the demands of writing and of real life are not always similar.
A hothouse flower trained to bloom out of season and in the wrong climate. I do not belong.
