The Writing Life Quotes

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

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

I'm not in the speech making business. I'm not in the seminar business. I'm not in the writing book business. I'm in the changing lives business.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

I have obsessed about my weight in some sort of way all my life. I used to write in my journal what I weighed every day.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It's a natural process.

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

I love writing, it's the center of my life. If you don't love what you do, you'd better find something else to love. Otherwise, you don't have a reason for living.

Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

Whenever something good happens, write it down. Buy a special notebook . . . and use it to list all the good in your life.

Stop it now and take control. Write this on a card and pin it up where you can see it... MY THOUGHTS CONTROL MY LIFE!

I love to read. I remember hearing that the average author takes two years to write a book. So when I read a book, I feel like I am getting two years of life experiences.

Like the philosopher, the author views his task as one of establishing a clear connection between life and history, and of making the past bear fruit for the present and future.

I never stopped writing about what was actually going on in my life. There's nothing to hide.

Lifes light. Life is light. You can make light do anything you want to. Photography means 'light writing'.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

We leaned on family, church, school, friends and sports. That's basically all we had. All those things really shaped my life and shaped me musically. It's why I write the way I do.

I need - and occasionally love - to write for the same reasons I always did: hard as writing is, it's generally easier than life.

I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.

College is great. It's the only time in life where you can write a check for 39 cents... and bounce it.

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

A novel must give a sense of permanence as well as a sense of life.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

Besides the soothing effect it has, I think my favorite part of writing is being able to use my imagination and creativity to make new ideas and people and situations come to life.

Take it from your own life, write what you believe in.

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

Your life is truly your life… it belongs to you. It is your story to write with love. Day by day, line by line, write it well

An artist paints, dances, draws, writes, designs, or acts at the expanding edge of consciousness. We press into the unknown rather than the known. This makes life lovely and lively.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.

I, as a young guy getting out of music school, I didn't like the prospect of spending my life writing music for about 200 people.

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

Writers do not merely reflect and interpret life, they inform and shape life.

If your life is worth thinking about,it is worth writing about.

I'm always writing or playing because that is my life.

That which resembles most living one's life over again, seems to be to recall all the circumstances of it; and, to render this remembrance more durable, to record them in writing.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

I think of a child's mind as a blank book. During the first years of his life, much will be written on the pages. The quality of that writing will affect his life profoundly.

As I've evolved in life my writing process has taken a turn. I'm inspired by everyday life. I could be in the middle of something and hear a commercial. I enjoy songs writing themselves.

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.