Quotes and Sayings about Writing

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed, it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

A living poem had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

Word to the wise writer: never underestimate your secondary characters! But watch them... they sneak off with stuff.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

So long as men write what they think, then all of the other freedoms - all of them - may remain intact. And it is then that writing becomes a weapon of truth.

I do have a tendency to walk on the dark side sometimes. I have suffered from depression, I know how that feels, I have an innate inclination that way. Writing does help with that.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

I want to tell a story that makes the reader always want to see what will happen next.

Always speak the truth, think before you speak, and write it down afterwards.

I listen to my words, but they fall far below
I let my music take me, where my heart wants to go

You cannot write for children. They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

When asked, 'How do you write?' I invariably answer, 'one word at a time.'

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears.

Pen, paper and books are the gunpowder of the mind.

Writers may be solitary but they also tend to flock together. They like being solitary together.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

The aim of writing is to make others see.

Coming up with ideas is the easiest thing on earth. Putting them down is the hardest.

I had at some point the epiphany that if I wanted to be a writer, maybe I should stop thinking about writing, or stop writing about writing, and actually write.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

When I'm driving the highway by myself is when I write best.

You write about what you know, and you write about what you want to know.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

If the reader cares, I don't think it matters so much whether your hero is in fact an anti-hero.

By the time you read this letter, these words will be those of the past. The me of now is gone.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

The only way you can truly get to know an author is through the trail of ink he leaves behind him. The person you think you see is only an empty character: truth is always hidden in fiction.

I'm not claiming divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can ... But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

The books I've written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

Having conquered numbers, humankind moved on to something even more boring: by inventing writing.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

A writer should never have the audacity to write about themselves unless they're willing to separate every layer of protection between the author's soul and their book. The words should come directly from the center of the gut, tearing through flesh and bone as they break free. Ugly and honest and bloody and a little bit terrifying, but completely exposed.

Anyone who thinks the pen is mightier than the sword has not been stabbed with both.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone.

True love stories never have endings.

Disappearances are bread-and-butter to journalists.

To write a loveletter, you have to start without knowing what you're gonna write and end without knowing what you wrote.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.