Write Quotes

1. "He admired writers whose own stories were as interesting as the ones they wrote."
Author: Adam Langer

2. "Advice? I don't have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you're writing, you're a writer. Write like you're a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there's no chance for a pardon. Write like you're clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you've got just one last thing to say, like you're a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God's sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don't. Who knows, maybe you're one of the lucky ones who doesn't have to."
Author: Alan Wilson Watts

3. "I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer."
Author: Aleksandar Hemon

4. "Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to."
Author: Alexis Bledel

5. "Only write a story that only you can write."
Author: Alysha Speer

6. "Don't ask a writer what he's working on. It's like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease."
Author: Amy Lowell

7. "About novel Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott.Q: What does the title "Imperfect Birds" mean?It's a line from a poem by Rumi. The line is "Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds", and it's really about how these kind of scraggly, raggedy nests that are our lives are the sanctuary for other people to step into, and that if you want to see the divine, you really step into the absolute ordinary. When you're at your absolutely most lost and dejected ... where do you go? You go to the nests left by other imperfect birds, you find other people who've gone through it. You find the few people you can talk to about it.from Writer's Digest May/June 2010"
Author: Anne Lamott

8. "Look at it this way: if you write the novel of 'Cold Mountain,' it costs exactly the same to produce and market as a novel set in a room. If you make the film, the disparity of costs is huge."
Author: Anthony Minghella

9. "It's a great paradox and a great injustice that writers write because we fear death and want to leave something indestructable in our wake, and at the same time, are drawn to things that kill: whiskey and cigarette, unprotected sex and deep fried burritos.It's true that you can get away with drinking and smoking and sunbathing when you're in your teens and twenties, and it's true that rock stars are free to die at twenty-nine, but a lit star needs a long life."
Author: Ariel Gore

10. "He asked if I was a songwriter, and I said yeah, that I was in town because I'd won this contest. He said, okay, then he was gonna play me his hit, and started singing 'When it's time to relax, one beer stands clear... '"
Author: Arthur Godfrey

11. "Musicians write and play and sing for the love and soul of it. They don't need somebody else to tell them how to sing a song, because then it's somebody else's vision."
Author: Auliq Ice

12. "The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship."
Author: Bernard Cornwell

13. "I flew into a small airport surrounded by cornfields and pastures, ready to carry out the two commands my father had written out for me the night before I left Calcutta: Spend two years studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then come back home and marry the bridegroom he selected for me from our caste and class."
Author: Bharati Mukherjee

14. "...She may think this song means I like her,But she'd be very wrong,I was bored in macro, so I decided to write a song,..."
Author: Chelsea M. Cameron

15. "I know more about Emily Bronte than anyone I know. I know enough about her family to have been a part. I've walked with her on her damp luscious lonely moors, watched her strain to write on miniscule scraps of paper, seen her hide her works from prying eyes. I've brooded alongside her and participated in her taciturnity. Before her death at the ripe old age of 30, I nursed her from the things that ultimately killed her: tuberculosis with a side order of Victorian thinking."
Author: Chila Woychik

16. "The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back."
Author: China Miéville

17. "Make your own worlds. Make your own laws. Make your own creations, your own star systems. Don't feel answerable to anyone, or as though you have to create after some preordained model. You don't have to write like myself, or King or Anne Rice: be yourself. Nothing is more wonderful than discovering a new voice, particularly if it happens to be your own."
Author: Clive Barker

18. "Listen, twenty years ago, it wasn't so cool to have a calculator watch, right? And spending all day inside playing with your calculator watch sent a clear message that you weren't doing so well socially. And judgments like ‘like' and ‘dislike' and ‘smiles' and ‘frowns' were limited to junior high. Someone would write a note and it would say, ‘Do you like unicorns and stickers?' and you'd say, ‘Yeah, I like unicorns and stickers! Smile!' That kind of thing. But now it's not just junior high kids who do it, it's everyone, and it seems to me sometimes I've entered some inverted zone, some mirror world where the dorkiest shit in the world is completely dominant. The world has dorkified itself."
Author: Dave Eggers

19. "My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few."
Author: Debbie Macomber

20. "...why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know? Perhaps that's not the right way to start at all. Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about. We should teach young people and ourselves to expand our hearts and write what we can feel. We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next."
Author: Elif Shafak

21. "I have the strangest thoughts in my head, maybe I should not write them down."
Author: Erlend Loe

22. "The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief."
Author: Fred Saberhagen

23. "I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards."
Author: Garth Marenghi

24. "I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences."
Author: Gary Soto

25. "Write in recollection and amazement for yourself."
Author: Jack Kerouac

26. "I've got no ego; I just like to have thousands of people write to me and tell me how wonderful I am."
Author: Jim Beaver

27. "So why a book? Well, since you've come into my life, you've been a constant source of entertainment while simultaneously driving me insane. I felt I had to write down my observations about you in a book. And also for money, so you could eat and continue to break things."
Author: Jim Gaffigan

28. "Everyone has a book within them. Everyone has to write it thinking, 'How will I help other people? What will the book do to touch lives?'"
Author: Joachim De Posada

29. "I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them."
Author: John Ashbery

30. "We must begin to make what I call 'conscious choices,' and to really recognize that we are the same. It's from that place in my heart that I write my songs."
Author: John Denver

31. "I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together."
Author: John Green

32. "You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh."
Author: John Green

33. "It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news."
Author: John Mellencamp

34. "I taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds."
Author: Jon Scieszka

35. "The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money."
Author: Karl Marx

36. "I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death."
Author: Kate Forsyth

37. "Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don't love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he's horrible to her, and that's what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille's ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you're writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don't typically get with the ‘whore' or the ‘slut' or the sexual girl."
Author: Kate Zambreno

38. "It is always easier to write from the heart and deal with things in the present."
Author: Keifer Thompson

39. "I become aware of you,standing next to me at the bus stop,and I become awareof my own breath.It's forty degrees outand you're wearing a t-shirtand I am the oneout of place.You light a cigarette. Self-destruction,but the delicious kind. The onlykind.Barely there bite marksand dark under-eye circles.I've known you for a grand totalof thirty-six secondsbut I want to write you a letter(do people still do that?)of words I don't know yet. I feel likeI've seen you before,but in a passing caror a barely lit window at dusk. Caughtin a moment of humanity.I close my eyes and I can see us,together,laying on cold ground:nearly deadbut never feeling more alive.We watch vultures circle above us,and then move on,looking for something better,fresher.Our eyes meet,streetlamps flicker,and your lips part,smoke rolling outlike a beckoning finger:"Come,have a taste of my mortality."
Author: Kristina Kutateladze

40. "About the library," he whispered. He took out the pencil stub from his pocket and poised it over the page."Will you write like Mr. Blake or like yourself?" I inquired.He wrote and whispered the words aloud as he did. "I am in the library. It smells like old stuff.""It smells familiar," I suggested. "It smells like words." Because his left side was to me, I couldn't easily take his hand to write."Books are boring," James said as he wrote."They line the walls like a thousand leather doorways to be opened into worlds unknown," I offered.He thought about this and then wrote with a smile, "I hate books."
Author: Laura Whitcomb

41. "I dare you all to write one more thing that you won't say to my face."
Author: Marilyn Manson

42. "He frowned. She laughed. He brightened. She pouted. He grinned. She flinched. Come on: we don't do that. Except when we're pretending. Only babies frown and flinch. The rest of us just fake with our fake faces. He grinned. No He didn't. If a guy grins at you for real these days, you'd better chop his head off before he chops off yours. Soon the sneeze and the yawn will be mostly for show. Even the twitch. She laughed. No she didn't. We laugh about twice a year. Most of us have lost our laughs and now make do with false ones.He smiled. Not quite true. All that no good to think, no good to say, no good to write. All that no good to write."
Author: Martin Amis

43. "Do-gooders are easily overlooked. We're supposed to be soft, touchy-feely types, who wear Birkenstocks, compost everything, and write poetry by candlelight."
Author: Nancy Lublin

44. "Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Paleolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales...from Ordovician to Devonian, on the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover... An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster..."
Author: Penelope Lively

45. "You know, this always happens. Whenever I go away, I always think I'll come back to mountains of exciting posts, with parcels and telegrams and letters full of scintillating news - and I'm always disappointed. In fact, I really think someone should set up a company called holidaypost.com which you would pay to write you loads of exciting letters, just so you had something to look forward to when you got home."
Author: Sophie Kinsella

46. "Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it."
Author: Stephanie Connolly

47. "When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I immediately knew that I wanted to write horror stories. I had read Arthur Machen before I read Lovecraft, and I didn't have that reaction at all. It was what I sensed in Lovecraft's works and what I learned about his myth as the "recluse of Providence" that made me think, "That's for me!" I already had a grim view of existence, so there was no problem there. I was and am agoraphobic, so being reclusive was a snap. The only challenge was whether or not I could actually write horror stories. So I studied fiction writing and wrote every day for years and years until I started to get my stories accepted by small press magazines. I'm not comparing myself to Lovecraft as a person or as a writer, but the rough outline of his life gave me something to aspire to. I don't know what would have become of me if I hadn't discovered Lovecraft."
Author: Thomas Ligotti

48. "You cannot write unless you write much."
Author: W. Somerset Maugham

49. "As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production."
Author: Will Self

50. "Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write."
Author: William Cobbett

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