Writing Quotes

• Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

  Kate Braverman

  Heart, Hunting, Sight

  17 Copy quote

• Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.

  Rod Serling

  People, Talent, Twilight Zone

  33 Copy quote

• When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

  Charles Baxter

  Air, Waiting, Spirit

  9 Copy quote

• Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

  Oliver Herford

  Inspirational, Witty, Drinking

  "Attributed to Oliver Herford in "Speaker's Handbook of Epigrams and Witticisms" (p. 187)". 1955.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

  John Steinbeck

  Powerful, Believe, Important

  The New York Times, June 02, 1969.

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• We're past the age of heroes and hero kings. ... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.

  John Updike

  Kings, Hero, Past

  13 Copy quote

• The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

  Samuel Butler

  Drained

  Samuel Butler (1951). “Samuel Butler's notebooks”

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

  Tom Clancy

  Life, Witty, Truth

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.

  Mel Brooks

  Character, Names, People

  "Why Mel Brooks can save the human race" by Alastair Campbell, www.theguardian.com. November 2, 2006.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.

  William Styron

  Age, Literature, Dull

  William Styron, James L. W. West (1985). “Conversations with William Styron”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Moving, Creating, Delicious

  Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller (1980). “The Letters of Gustave Flaubert: 1830-1857”, p.203, Harvard University Press

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

  John le Carre

  Movie, Book, Reading

  16 Copy quote

• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

  Will Self

  Notebook, Memories, Mean

  Will Self's rules for writers, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

  43 Copy quote

  Show source

• Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Doors, Two, Important

  8 Copy quote

• If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

  Steven Wright

  Funny, Humor, Editing

  23 Copy quote

• Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil-but there is no way around them.

  Isaac Asimov

  Rejection, Soul, Devil

  7 Copy quote

• To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.

  Milan Kundera

  Mean, Doe

  11 Copy quote

• I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Want

  11 Copy quote

• The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.

  William Faulkner

  Dream, Artist, Perfection

  34 Copy quote

• If you wait for inspiration to write you're not a writer, you're a waiter.

  Dan Poynter

  Inspiration, Waiting, Waiter

  55 Copy quote

• Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.

  Franklin P. Adams

  Imagination, Might, Hours

  Franklin P. Adams (1944). “Nods and Becks”

  59 Copy quote

  Show source

• Words are a lens to focus one's mind.

  Ayn Rand

  Focus, Mind, Lenses

  26 Copy quote

• The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught.

  Walt Whitman

  Worry, Waiting, Style

  87 Copy quote

• I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

  Anais Nin

  Believe, World, I Believe

  "Woman as Writer" by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, (p. 38), 1978.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Swimming, History, Water

  Letter to Frances Scott Fitzgerald (undated)

  38 Copy quote

  Show source