Writing Life Quotes

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“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.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

“In order to write about life first you must live it.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
― Stephen Fry

“If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Blessed are the weird people:
poets, misfits, writers
mystics, painters, troubadours
for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.”
― Jacob Nordby, Pearls of Wisdom: 30 Inspirational Ideas to live your best life now

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.”
― Robert Hass

“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”
― Karl Popper

“The world was her manuscript. No surface was safe.”
― Colleen Hoover, Verity

“Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.”
― A. Lee Martinez

“Writing is like breathing, it's possible to learn to do it well, but the point is to do it no matter what.”
― Julia Cameron, The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation Into the Writing Life

“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.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“It's like I get into a roller coaster, and sit there while it goes up and down and upside down and sometimes I get thrown out and I hit my head, but I crawl back in again and the moment I'm back in, it just keeps on going and going again...all of this, so I can find things out and then I write about the things I find out so you can find them out from me. All the bruises, all the wounds, all the bumps on the head, all the scars, just so I can take that and I can write all these things, and sometimes I say "God, I don't want to be in this roller coaster anymore." But when I think about it, if I'm not right here, then where the hell would I be? On the sidewalk? I wasn't born to stand on the sidewalk, I was born to fly around crazy in the sky!”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it.”
― Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood

“As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs...The way I write is who I am, or have become...”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".”
― Shubham Choudhary

“When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“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.”
― E.B. White, One Man's Meat

“I feel my fear moving away in rings through time for a million years.”
― breece d'j pancake, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake

“...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write...

...writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror...

...there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...”
― Robert Heinlen

“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our heats? Can the writer renew our hope for literary forms? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and then when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all." ~ Mrs. Oliver”
― Agatha Christie, Dead Man's Folly

“If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison”
― Sean Liburd

“I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who’s half a man,
Or the man who’s half a boy.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World

“A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.”
― Martin Amis