Writing Quotes

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.

I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.

Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

Don't write to sell, write to tell.

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

I don't write for a living. I live to write.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

Writers write. Everyone else makes excuses.

I am a trained professional liar. Do not read me as a textbook.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

God pity the poor novelist.

If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you.

Know your literary tradition, savor it, steal from it, but when you sit down to write, forget about worshiping greatness and fetishizing masterpieces.

Dig until you hit rock. Then take out that jackhammer and go a little deeper.

To read is to cover one's face. And to write is to show it.

Say what you have to say in the fewest possible words.

We have always learned about life by dramatising our questions.

Sometimes you're trapped in writing songs and you don't have enough distance from what you do anymore and you need the talent and the years of other people to come and jump in.

I stopped dying the moment I started writing

Our lives with all their miracles and wonders are merely a discontinuous string of incidents - until we create the narrative that gives them meaning

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

If we don't risk it all, we may as well not write at all.

Writing a poem is a lesson in the truest empathy. And to truly have empathy is to truly know power, or at least the only kind of power I’m interested in.

If a publisher declines your manuscript, remember it is merely the decision of one fallible human being, and try another.

Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

I don't care who writes a nation's laws - or crafts its advanced treaties - if I can write its economics textbooks.

Don't mistake a good setup for a satisfying conclusion - many beginning writers end their stories when the real story is just ready to begin.

Everything that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story.

No one should ever have to read a sentence twice because of the way it is put together.

The more you write, the better you will write! So - keep at it!

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

We write because something inside says we must and we can no longer ignore that voice.