"Writing a book is a "poor trade for the spirits" ~Julia, (The Tower Rooms by Mary Grant Bruce
"Writing a first draft is an act of discovery where you need to learn to mine your imagination. You can refine what comes out later." ~TWS
"Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." ~E.L. Doctorow
"Writing a novel or screen play is an adventure and an act of discovery. You can't control the process. Your stories take you to places you never realised you needed to go. And often what you didn't know at the start turns out to be the best parts of your story." ~The Writer's Studio
"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul." ~Anne Lamott
"Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed." ~Ernest Hemingway, Nobel laureate speech
"Writing has helped me know myself and to accept myself as I am, with my flaws and my assets." ~Mary Fields Whealdon, Better Help, FB, March 2024
"Writing is a confidence game. There is no failure just a big field to wander in." ~The Writer's Studio
"Writing is a mood changing activity. Most likely you will rarely feel like writing. The key thing is to just sit down and do the work regardless of how you feel. When you finish you will be so glad you did. The act of writing has its own reward." ~TWS
"Writing is a mood changing activity. The act of writing nourishes your spirit." ~TWS
"[Writing is] being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page." ~Mary Gaitskill
"Writing is a struggle against silence." ~Carlos Fuentes
"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go." ~E. L. Doctorow
“Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don’t try to be perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try and polish every sentence there’s a chance you’ll never get past the first chapter.” ~Iain Banks
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” ~Molière
"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.” ~Nadine Gordimer
"Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change." ~Julia Cameron
“Writing is not just an ability to write. There is more to it. Thinking and reasoning are just two seeds that would nourish letters and words to become fruits of inspiration and change! Let the seeds grow!” ~Rado Gatchalian
"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards." ~Robert Heinlein
"Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators." ~Olin Milleron Writing
"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money." ~Jules Renard
“Writing is the painting of the voice; the closer the resemblance, the better it is” ~Voltaire
"Writing is the supreme solace." ~William Somerset Maugham
"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery." ~Henry Miller
"Writing or making anything—a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake—has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up." ~Sharon Olds
"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." ~Isaac Asimov
OTHERS:
"A bad novel awakens senses, a good novel the conscience." ~Anon
"A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. But writing without a pencil is no particular advantage." ~Robert McNamara
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit" ~Richard Bach
"A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or evwen a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl." ~Ernest Hemingway
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." ~Virginia Woolf
"A writer's notebook is the perfect place to keep your inspiration, ideas, notes and references to anything else you need for your next project!" ~Hannah, Between The Line Editorial on WHY EVERY WRITER NEEDS A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK via PINTEREST
"A writer's notebook or inspiration journal is a great way to inspire yourself through quotes, writing prompts, poems, pictures, or really anything else you find interesting." ~from Owlcation dot com on HOW TO START A WRITER'S NOTEBOOK via PINTEREST
"A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden. A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway." ~Junot Diaz, Professor of Writing, Winner of Pulitzer Prize For Fiction
“A writer ought not to be an opinion-machine… The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.” ~Susan Sontag
"A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper." ~E. B. White
"All you have to do is write one tue sentence." ~Ernest Hemingway
"An arena where honest opinion is mixed freely with a lightly used editor's pen and freedom of expression is the rule of day." ~St.Alberts's Place on the Web
"Arranging an official dinner in an embassy is a little like writing a script for a play. The prolog is the guest list, often the most difficult part of the whole creative operation." ~Letitia Baldrige
"As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake." ~Aimee Bender
"As a writer you try to listen what others aren't saying ... and write about the silence." ~N. R. Hart
"At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year's planting." ~Annie Dillard
"Authenticity is the only style worth having. " ~The Writer's Studio
"But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments." ~Virginia Woolf
"Discretion is not the better part of biography." ~Lytton Strachey
"Don't forget—no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell." ~Charles de Lint
"Editing is everything. Cut until you can't cut anymore. " ~Esther Freud
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." ~Benjamin Franklin
"Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will." ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Every great personal story you have to tell involves overcoming adversity. If you shy away from adversity, you take away your ability to tell new stories." ~Farrel Droke
"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works." ~Virginia Woolf
"Everyone has a reason for their beliefs. Every single person on this earth has a story, and sadly, some people don't think their story matters through being bullied into silence. Everybody's story matters in this world. We just have to adapt and listen without judgment. That's how we all learn from one another, and I believe is the reason we are all put here. To learn and love one another despite our differences." ~Alison Amethyst Dalziel, August 14, 2018, FB comment
"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite." ~Edward Albee
"Finding your writer's brain is half of it. Finding your writer's heart is all of it." ~Karen Draper
"First sentences are doors to worlds." ~Ursula K. Le Guin
“How do you know, you ask, where to take your words? That’s another difference between the writing I do for others and for myself. In the first case, I know exactly where to go, and I just need to get there as quickly and smoothly as possible. In the second, I let the words lead me; I begin stories not knowing where they’ll go and how they’ll end. That’s the adventure, the fun, and the grace of creative writing.”
~ Jose Dalisay
Excerpt from essay “The Best Revenge,” (1.5.04) p.135
“The Knowing is in the Writing”
["I'm a writer, and my experience is that when I pick up pen and paper...just that very act...revs up the creative juices in me.
When one uses typed words, thoughts don't flow as easily! You might hit a wrong key, and that distracts one's thoughts.
When I write by putting pen to paper, the thoughts flow from deeply within, and sorts of "writes itself!""]
~Carolyn H Huggins, Better Help
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” ~Anne Frank
"I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape." ~Ray Bradbury
"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living." ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good." ~Seneca
"I think of a writer as a river: you reflect what passes before you." ~Natalia Ginzburg
"I try to wake up earlier every day just to imagine a beautiful story and get a word in before the world turns on its light upon me. Before the cars start their engines. Before the chaos pokes its head out and interfere with my rhythm. then I ask myself, "do I really need to write about the serene skies before they all wake up? Or should I just write about the naked truth that keeps all of us up till we finally fall asleep around 3 am?" I never know the answer cause that is when I am finally sound asleep! ... Of course I am joking. I never sleep. but I am in a writing mode and felt like writing this piece." ~Mary Tavakoli, on Time at 3am
"I would hurls words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human." ~Richard Wright
"I’d love a new start, to make new memories and forget the bad ones. I want to travel, see new places, different scene, different music, touching hearts. I want to meet new people, who will show me what it is to love and be loved in return. I want to leave it all behind, to erase my book, back to the very cover, and re-write my story." ~Anon
"I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk." ~H. L. Mencken
"If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own." ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day. The consistency, the monotony, the certainty, all vagaries and passions are covered by this daily occurrence. You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning. Sleep comes to you each day, and so does the muse… ’I know I have a novel in me,’ I often hear people say, ’But how can I get it out?’ The answer, always, is every day.” ~Walter Mosely
"If you want your life to be a magnificent story, then begin by realizing that you are the author and everyday you have the opportunity to write a new…" ~Mark Houlahan
"If you wish to be a writer, write." ~Epictetus
"In every man's writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded." ~Thomas Carlyle
"In order to write about life first you must live it.” ~Ernest Hemingway
“Insecure writers follow the rules. Rebellious writers break the rules. An artist masters the form.” ~Robert McKee
“It's a question of what you might do in your wildest imagination, not what you might do because you are bound by the strictures of polite behaviour. We don't want our writing to be bound by that. We'd like our stories to be greatly expressive of our fantasy life.” ~David Mamet
"It's not a bad idea to get the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone with them." ~Isabel Colegate
"It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone and can be made as offensive as a brickbat." ~Oscar Wilde
“Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.” ~Christina Baldwin
"Journaling is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time." ~Mina Murray
"Keep in mind that the only person to write for is yourself.Tell the story you most desperately want to read." ~Susan Isaacs
"Life is bearable when you have someone to write, and someone who writes you back." ~Eunjin Jang
"Look, then, into thine heart, and write!" ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Many have an irresistible itch for writing." ~Anon on Proverbs
"Most people are unable to write because they are unable to think, and they are unable to think because they congenitally lack the equipment to do so, just as they congenitally lack the equipment to fly over the moon." ~H. L. Mencken
"Nature is a writer's best friend." ~Agavé Powers
"No matter how long you've been at it, you always start from scratch." ~Jeffrey Eugenides
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." ~Robert Frost
"Once, lovers on faraway shores sat by candlelight and dipped ink to parchment, writing words that could not be erased. They took an evening to compose their thoughts, maybe the next evening as well." ~Mitch Albom
"One can rise early in the morning and have time to write (or, even, to take a walk and then write) before the world's work schedule begins. Also...one can live simply and honorably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully." ~Mary Oliver
“One must be pitiless about this matter of mood. In a sense writing will create the mood. Generally I've found this to be true. I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.” ~Joyce Carol Oates from TWS
“One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.” ~Alfred Kazin
"Our inks can unite people; there is power in its every stroke, I strongly believe!" ~Helen Sarita, FPB, June 2021
"Part of being a writer is being a strong, avid reader." ~Ann Eckhart
"People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up into the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit on back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to,it." ~Harlan Ellison
"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." ~Sir Francis Bacon
“Serious writers write, inspired or not. Over time they discover that routine is a better friend than inspiration.” ~Ralph Keyes from TWS
"Sometimes, writing is all that we have. Sometimes, the best poems are written for the wrong ones. Sometimes, our poems are the only thing that remained right for them." ~Mica Meñez, A Cup of Words and Coffee
“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.” ~Bonnie Friedman
"Tears are words that need to be written." ~Paulo Coelho
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power." ~Toni Morrison
"The act of writing itself is like an act of love. There is contact. There is exchange too. We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them colour." ~Georges Rodenbach, The Bells of Bruges
"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." ~Mary Heaton Vorse
"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." ~Gustave Flaubert
"The first draft is just telling yourself a story." ~Terry Prachett, Freedom With Writing
"The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it." ~Samuel Johnson
"The only happy author in this world is he who is below the care of reputation." ~Washington Irving
"The only way to write a gret book is o write it through the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time." ~Arnold Bennett, novelist, (TFBFG 1987/cah)
"The pen can either build or destroy a nation that is why as responsible poets and citizens, we choose to unite our breathren rather than add to the chaos and confusion that's causing us to become divided. It takes spiritual maturity for one to be able to purge out the corrupted self with all its selfishness, vainglory, spitefulness and pride." ~Don M. Luman-ag, FPB, June 2021
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." ~Anaïs Nin
"The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words." ~William H. Gass
"The writer's job is to tell the truth." ~Ernest Hemingway
"There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. [There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take.]I am much more a gardener than an architect." ~George Raymond Richard Martin
"There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." ~Ernest Hemingway
"There must be millions of people all over the world who never get any love letters... I could be their leader." ~Charlie Brown
"They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription." ~Samuel Butler
“To write clearly and creatively we need to trust our own voice. Like any other art, creative writing is a function of the whole person. The unconscious must flow freely and richly, bringing at demand all the treasures of memory, all the emotions, incidents, scenes, intimation of character and relationships, which it has stored away in its depths. The unconscious is shy, elusive and unwieldy, but it is possible to tap it at will, and even direct it.” ~Dorothea Brande
"To write is human, to edit is divine." ~Stephen King
"To write is human, to receive a letter: Divine!" ~Susan Lendroth
"To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once an intellect, soul, and taste." ~George Louis Buffon
"We write by the light of every story we have read." ~Richard Peck
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." ~Carl Sagan
"When we write the truth, there isn’t always a grand group applauding. But write it we must.” ~C. S. Lewis
"When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen." ~Anon
"When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism. When you steal from many, it's research." ~Wilson Mizner
"When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools." ~Michael Leboeuf
"Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is that you’re having a relationship with your mind.” ~Natalie Goldberg
"Write your day as you want your story to read. Make this day count more than yesterday." ~John, One Spark Foundation
"Write your hurts in the sand. Carve your Blessings in stone." ~Anon
"Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals." ~John Steinbeck on Clowns
"Writers aren't exactly people. They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person." ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Writers are people who write. Writing has its own reward. If you want to write a novel or script you have to enjoy the process." ~The Writers' Studio
"You have to live your story before being able to write your story." ~Amy Shearn
“You might have the insights of Buddha, but if you can’t tell a story, your ideas will be as dry as dust. Craft is the sum total of all means used to draw the audience into deep involvement, to hold that involvement and ultimately reward it with a moving and meaningful experience.” ~Robert McKee
"You must simply love to write. Then, when there's interest in one of yourn stories, it's a bonus. There's a lot of giving yourself up to it than being so much in command of anything. It's like giving yourself up to something that's going to take you along with it. And that you're going to go wherever it goes. It may work out, it may not, but you're going to go there." ~Romulus Linney
"You should write because you love the shape of the stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page." ~Annie Proulx
YOU KNOW YOU'RE A WRITER WHEN …
… you're prepared to make a fool of yourself as research for a scene in your novel.
… you break up with someone because they don't know the difference between your and you're.
… you catch yourself speaking and behaving like your lead character at work.
… you dig out your pen in the middle of a shopping expedition and scribble away on a notepad.
… you have a baby name websites saved on your computer. (thatgirlinthebatmanshirt/tumblr)
… you've gone so far to see as how your characters would respond to their natural environments, like subjecting yourself to the freezing cold. (tumblr)
… you've honed the skill of procrastination. (tumblr)
… you know how many times J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Louis L'Amour were rejected.
… you know you've been editing too long when the word edit looks like it needs to be edited. (@BookEmDonna)
… you look back on things you've written before and can't help cringing or laughing. (agonizayn-payne/tumblr)
… you make up quotes in your head that will be famous after you become a best-selling author.
… you narrate the day's events in your head, describing yourself in third person.
… you sit at your desk writing and suddenly pull an expression just to make sure you've described it correctly. (devanshade/tumblr )
… you wake up in the morning and you've written an entire novel in your dreams.
… you watch horror movies for ideas, even when you know you'll have nightmares after you do it.
… you write titles for novels with your alphabet soup.
… your handbag contents always include a notebook, a pen, and a book to read.
… your password for anything is the title of your favourite book or an author's name.
Source:
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