Write Quotes

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown...

Story always tells us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make ou...

When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

I write as if I’ve lived a lot of things I haven’t lived.

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things...

That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyo...

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you sh...

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I sh...

The main thing is to make history, not to write it.

I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.

I'm thankful to have time to write.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some thi...

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in...

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, tha...

Please write music like Wagner, only louder.

Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refu...

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many...

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking o...

Whenever I write a story, I hope it appeals to both boys and girls.

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "Wha...

I was born to travel and write verse.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembe...

You can never know enough about your characters

What did you do for them, Bone? Teach them to read and write? Help them rebuild, give the, Christ, h...

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will ma...

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop

Vulnerability has a strength of its own.

Beware, then, of the long word that's no better than the short word: "assistance" (help), "numerous"...

Don't annoy your readers by over-explaining--by telling them something they already know or can figu...

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If...

Good writing is good writing, whatever form it takes and whatever we call it.

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like t...

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to re...

Writing is such a lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered up.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

It wont do to say that the reader is too dumb or too lazy to keep pace with the train of thought. If...

But on the question of who you're writing for, don't be eager to please.

Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush a...

...being "rather unique" is no more possible than being rather pregnant.

I'm often dismayed by the sludge I see appearing on my screen if I approach writing as a task--the d...

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom...

But apart from these lazinesses of logic, what makes the story so tired is the failure of the writer...

The writer, his eye on the finish line, never gave enough thought to how to run the race.

Full-blooded romantic love I wouldn't be able to write about.

Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not,...

Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram--it's the ea...

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost...

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your ...

There may be a Nurse Ratched-like listing of things that must be done right this moment: foods that ...

Toni Morrison said, "The function of freedom is to free someone else," and if you are no longer wrac...

There are few experiences as depressing as that anxious barren state known as writer's block, where ...

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts....

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can g...

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes...

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers...

If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," I...

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes...

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I en...

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class Fra...

A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. ...

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious new...

As accurate as a blind man pissing during an earthquake.”“Wow...,” I breathed.She frowned

Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by...

We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write.

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have ...

On the train I saw that world passing my window. It was when I came to see it was I who was passing ...

I've always been shy physically. This in part tended to keep me from rushing into things, including ...

Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow...

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words an...

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath...

I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than n...

Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writer...

writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think ...

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained t...

We all write poems it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't te...

There is no doubt that I have lots of words inside me; but at moments, like rush-hour traffic at the...

Why write, if this too easy activity of pushing a pen across paper is not given a certain bull-fight...

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for con...