Quotes about Writing

Stop a minute, right where you are. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.

I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it.

The writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being.

A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Read, read, read. Read everything.

Art is not concerned with environment either; it doesn't care where it is.

I am interested in the point where fiction and reality meet.

I am trying to say it all in one sentence, between one cap and one period.

He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.

I'm not young enough to know everything.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Just writing and being in the studio was like therapy for me.

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

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, or making friends. It’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

It’s surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

Books and movies are like apples and oranges. They both are fruit, but taste completely different.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Writing is an agony, not an ecstasy.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.

The greatest sin for a writer is to be boring.

We don’t even ask for happiness, just a little less pain.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

A word after a word after a word is power.