Quotes about writers-on-writing

Great writers create writers of smaller gifts copy

Time heals all wounds some broken hearts -- and most cases of writer's block.

You say you're a writer but you're depressed. Not an excuse write from there. Write some depressing sh*t. Believe me. You will have plenty of readers who can relate. Remember writers write.

This is a little secret that all writers share: We have two lives the one we live on Earth and the one we live in our books.

There is an audience for everything our job as writers is to do the work and provide readers with a choice.

I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies women who have faced the storms of life! Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!

Love will find you when you least expect it to it will find it in an unusual moment on a strange day!

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day a novel should not be interrupted.

What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.

If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundr

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know w

Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a "capacity for clear thought," able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They're geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

Ink, a Drug.

Writing is the dragon that lives underneath my floorboards. The one I incessantly feed for fear it may turn and devour my ass. Writing is the friend who doesn't return my phone calls; the itch I'm unable to scratch; a dinner invitation from a cannibal; elevator music for a narcoleptic. Writing is the hope of lifting all boats by pissing in the ocean. Writing isn't something that makes me happy like a good cup of coffee. It's just something I do because not writing, as I've found, is so much wors

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times,

Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into th

Anyone who says writing is easy isn't doing it right.

Murphy is a writer's best friend, but you have to keep an eye on him, or he'll steal the silver.

I write to believe in goodness.

All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.

Feels so good to be quoted

To me, quotes function as the sunscreen against a writers brilliance. As soon as I cannot stand to look at the magnificence of the acropolis of pure thought the writer managed to doll out in the cognizant chaos - I quote him, and by doing so I am discharged and freed. On the other hand, even while I do acknowledge that some things cannot be quoted, I vehemently distrust any writer whose army of quotes does not consist of impeccable warriors but the sort of bootless canon fodder that caused one t

I realize that some of you may have come in hopes of hearing tips on how tobecome a professional writer. I say to you, "If you really want to hurt yourparents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you cando is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestitehermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you'vebeen to college.

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power wo

I don’t mind writing philosophical thoughts. If I don’t want to die like one.

Writer's block is just another name for fear.

The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.

The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction—which is naive and misplaced—that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” ...“Did you write today?”“Yes.”“Then you’re a writer today.”It would be lovely if being a writ

The greatest moments of creativity come in absolute solitude, when one’s mind is free from distraction and able to probe the depths of the impossible.

Doing nothing can be as rewarding as doing something. And doing very little can be as productive, in a creative sense, as doing a lot.

There's still too much energy leftover at this tomb-desk, on Broadway, when I am semi-asleep at night in our bedroom, struggling to get a good night's rest. There's an overflow of loin energy. It spills out from my pores as if I were a cracked drum of reacting chemicals. I need to work to expend this excess energy in words, stories and books....My mind is a body that's a mind.

We can create transcending stories for readers and for us. Creativity is a double edge sword, which can kill the writer.

We write not just to show off, not just to tell, or only to have written. We write to know ourselves.

I write because there are things in me that cannot die.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Sometimes saying 'goodbye' may be the best thing to say to someone!

If you don’t do anything to capture and draw your memories—no matter whether you choose words, pencil, photography, or filming—the only place where they have a chance to exist is in your head, which can’t be called the most reliable place to store them; soon, they’d be lost forever… leaving no trace, like they never existed… like YOU never existed… same as those billions and billions of lives that had already disappeared from the world.

Imagination is the real magic that exists in this world. Look inwards, to see outwards. And capture it in writing.

I wish my brain had an off switch. Maybe that way I could get some sleep.

In a suspended psychic state, writers cull words and symbols from the mystical world of memory, imagination, and intuition.

Save your work, you may never know when the light will go off.

We all have a place within us, that would like to rewrite the way our life was written out for us....That's why people want to become authors.

It’s easy to write a sentence, paragraph, or book. What’s difficult is writing the best sentence, paragraph, or book, you can write.

I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

Literature sustains life because it captures death in its forward march. Clickety-clickety-clack, the wheels go round and round ...

Begin to write, your heart will flow with sacred words.

Words are my weapons. They might kill or cure the readers, that’s out of my control.

Become my muse. And let me paint you with my words...

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person’s emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person’s head by the picture invoking ability of language. Sel

Reality is just a matter of perception.

I'm a writer. I'm a Christian. I like sex. But I haven't had it. I believe in waiting until marriage. But that doesn't mean I want my characters to.

Henry had written a novel because there was a hole in him that needed filling, a question that needed answering, a patch of canvas that needed painting—that blend of anxiety, curiosity and joy that is at the origin of art—and he had filled the hole, answered the question, splashed colour on the canvas, all done for himself, because he had to. Then complete strangers told him that his book had filled a hole in them, had answered a question, had brought colour to their lives. The comfort of strang

Writers need faith, or else we can never trust the action of our words!

When the vision fills your brain and passion hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled. (Marti Melville)

When the vision fill yours mind and passio hits your gut, the need to write it down cannot be stifled.

The writer who position is Christian, and probably also the writer whose position is not, will begin to wonder at this point if there could not be some ugly correlation between our unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literature that shows us the joy of life. He may at least be permitted to ask if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society.

Fiction operates through the senses, and I think one reason that people find it so difficult to write stories is that they forget how much time and patience is required to convince through the senses. No reader who doesn't actually experience, who isn't made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him. The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

Sylvia Plath and I met a long time ago. A really long time ago. Was it a summer day? No! It was a wintry November morning!

She cured me of my sadness.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and dived deeply into her ocean of love and that's how I saved my soul!

Either I love someone completely, totally and madly or not at all!

And then it dawned on me that the greatest love stories in the world never have happy endings.

I know not what it is about you that makes me go crazy but I do know that the radiance in your eyes is more dazzling than that in all the diamonds of this world!

I know not what it is about you that makes me go crazy but I do know that the fragrance of your skin is more sublime than that of all the perfumes of this world!

We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!

You made a poet fall in love with the world.

I write because there is a madness within me to express my thoughts in words. I write because I feel passionately about certain feelings and there is this yearning within me to express these feelings in words. I am not comfortable meeting a lot of people. I like solitude. I like thinking and I dont like talking much.

I have always enjoyed my solitude. It gives me time to think and to write.

You may follow the footstepsThe whole day will passWith you going around in circlesYet not reaching anywhere at last!

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

If you write a kid's book only for kids, then you have failed.

I meet people and they become chapters in my stories.

There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write.

as a childthere was eitherbooksorpain.i chose books.-how i became a writer

Being a writer, I take thing seriously (not too seriously). I may be a young writer/self publisher, I do love to write and I want to share my stories to the world. but more importantly, I do take writing seriously.

He looked at the blue sky above and the green grass below and he knew he would always love this world!

I began writing late; my first articles and stories were published after I was thirty, and I was motivated by money. Money is not a bad motivation. The need to eat keeps us from laziness, and the fact that someone is willing to pay to read what we write assures us that we have indeed written.

A writer's role was never just to tell stories, but to create a world to encompass and share with others.

The so called beautiful people, especially the ones who are obsessed with their looks, bore me. They just have this superficiality in all things that they do or want to accomplice in life. It is like they want to look 'beautiful' all the time but not 'be beautiful' from within. I like depth. People who go deep into the way of things and the meaning of life. People who may not look beautiful but are truly beautiful!

The unkind words that we said and the unkind deeds that we did will haunt us one day!

The night is the balm for the wounded souls of the world.

I do not follow any tradition. I may stand at the beginning of one.

Looking at old photographs inundates you with a flood of nostalgic emotions! And you can't be sure where you want to swim in the deluge of memories!

Your eyes hold all the answers to my life's problems.

I and my silences keep talking to each other.

Writing is not a hobby. It's the only way I get to shut up the demons in my head.