The Writing Life Quotes

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

I smiled, I waited, I was circumspect; O never, never, never write that I missed life or loving.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

Writing only leads to more writing.

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

One has to live a life that creates a writer.

The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd - one cannot answer deep questions about what one's life was like - one writes novels about it.

I definitely still have ... angst but I also wrote some songs that say it's okay to love, now. I'm happy in my life, and it's a bit easier to write happy songs when you are actually happy.

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Life is this great big blackboard, and on it you write all the things that you do.

If you are in doubt whether to write a letter or not, don't. And the advice applies to many doubts in life besides that of letter writing.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Endless conflicts. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and little cannot understand one another.

Don't take life so serious. It ain't no-hows permanent.

That to me is the way any good romantic would look at his life: Live it first, then write it down before you go.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

All through my writing life I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

I personally feel the need to experience life and new music and ideas before I can sit down and start writing music again.

By the end of the writing process, which is about 80 songs per album, I look at the material and think, what's going to make a difference in someone's life.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.

Sometimes writers of no talent at all can write great acting scenes. Sometimes the very best writers can't write scenes that come to life.

My life, at least, is divided between writing and performing and mixtures of the two.

That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

What a long way it is from one life to another: yet why write if not for that distance; if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.

You cant write about stuff you dont know about. You have to live it. You have to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Live life to be a good songwriter.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

Music for me is this thing that's sort of saved my life over the course of my whole life, whether it be writing songs or listening to other people's stuff.

Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.

Well, I have to write. A lot of people forget that. They think I’m sort of crazy baffoon who can’t make up his mind what to do in life

To read and write will help you understand life. . .to sew and mend will help you survive it.

I write about the trials and triumphs of contemporary life - and often the readers see themselves between the lines of the story.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

Writing is the act of discovery.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.