Top 100 Keep Writing Quotes
#1. Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.
Anne Waldman
#2. Just Keep Writing! Who cares if it's a Saturday, or if you left your laptop at home, or if you're around people? Just write one word, one line, jot down one idea. No matter how little you write, it's movement in the right direction. Forward. Toward completion.
Tammy Ferebee
#3. I have learned one lesson as a writer ... keep writing and never throw any notes away. Written parts that can't be used today ... may be used for other books tomorrow.
Timothy Pina
#4. Rule number four for me as a writer? Plotlines are like sharks: They either keep moving or they die. ~J.R. Ward
J.R. Ward
#5. Keep writing. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Put some words on paper. You never know what will happen.
L.T. Brooks
#6. Half the rhymes you write, you're saying that you're better than the other MC. That's how we keep the craft sharp.
Ice-T
#7. An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.
Artie Shaw
#8. I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them ... But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember.
Michael Scott
#9. If you're a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you're a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don't stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
Dana Brunetti
#10. A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.
Robert Benchley
#11. The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe - to keep reading safe from writing.
Joshua Cohen
#12. I'm just very sort of compulsive and lack the ability to keep things in perspective. If I'm not writing or playing guitar or on the microphone or out on the road, I'm cleaning pots and pans or freaking out about some plumbing issue or tweeting.
Marc Maron
#13. The biggest sacrifice to me is to not be in an atmosphere where I can keep writing and moving forward.
Trey Anastasio
#14. Some of my affectionate envious friends say, "You write too much." Maybe, I answer. But as long as the best of your little is worse than the worst of my much, I will keep on doing so.
Juan Ramon Jimenez
#15. Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Cheryl Strayed
#16. I'm just not in a writing mood, but I keep going. What if the garbage man were not in a garbage mood? or the doctor not in a healing mood?
Jean Nicole Rivers
#17. I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.
Ernest Hemingway,
#18. I'm always mystified by the day-to-day workings of entities like Twitter that provide framework but not content, but I suppose it could be compared to the U.S. Postal Service, which manages to keep a lot of people employed doing lots of stuff other than writing letters.
Susan Orlean
#19. All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland.
Jimi Hendrix
#20. Anuj Bahari has always been a really good literary agent for me. What a good agent does is that he manages many of your business aspects so you can keep your time free for writing.
Amish Tripathi
#21. There were times when depression, anxiety, whatever, would keep me from writing. I still get depressed and anxious, but I just don't let it stop me. I've just learned to move it to one side if I want to work.
David St. John
#22. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.
Mordecai Richler
#23. Better to think of writing, of what one does, as an activity, rather than an identity to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun.
Lorrie Moore
#24. I love stand-up, but the process of writing is a little more lonely. I want to keep doing both, though.
Jack Whitehall
#26. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
#27. My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
George Bernard Shaw
#28. Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#29. I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.
Jack Prelutsky
#30. I like writing songs - I keep saying that one day I'll do something with them, but I haven't yet.
Tom Conti
#31. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#32. It is impossible to know what fate will bring. If you love to write or paint, you will keep on writing or painting, and things will either work out or not, and you just have to keep being in the process.
Maira Kalman
#33. He has discovered the truths that keep writers chained to their desks: the primacy of the inner life and the sheer exhilaration of creating a world from scratch.
Barbara Klein Moss
#34. I can't keep myself from creativity. Ideas flash like lightning burning my bones. It must flow out of my hands or it will burst me apart.
Patricia Robin Woodruff
#35. I don't actually have to think very hard when I'm writing. I mean, there are times where it's a task, and you have to plug away and plug away. But then there are times when a song writes itself in 15 minutes, and you're just struggling to keep up with it.
Patty Griffin
#36. I write because I can remember and to keep those memories alive. I write for pleasure. I write because I must.
F.M. Burgett
#37. Keeping a habit, in the smallest way, protects and strengthens it. I write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to keep my habit of daily writing strong.
Gretchen Rubin
#38. Nietzsche himself was a great moralist; his writings abound with value judgments about individuals, character types, modes of thinking, and national traits. It is as if he develops immoralist psychology in order to tame his own nature, to keep his own greatest vice in check.
John Carroll
#39. But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.
George MacDonald
#40. So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.
Edward Hirsch
#41. Don't write what you know. Write what you love. That's what will keep you writing.
Chris Humphreys
#42. If I make you read, then I'll keep quiet. If I make you think, then I'll keep reading. If I make you smile, then I'll keep writing.
Thomas Lopinski
#43. I
Keep writing.
Not because I want to.
It's a respiratory illness.
Jonathan Heatt
#44. What I enjoy most are those times when I get an idea and it just flows - the words coming so fast that I'm scribbling to keep up with my characters. I don't have any writing must-haves; this is a good thing, since I've done a lot of my writing in random places like the playground or the subway.
Leah Cypess
#45. Writing your own jokes, you just kind of keep working on something until you think it might work, and then you try it out and hope for the best.
Aziz Ansari
#46. If we don't keep people engaged, we're not going to move you. And if we move you, we've done something useful. That's what anybody who writes genre knows.
Akiva Goldsman
#47. Sit down right now. Give me this moment. Write whatever's running through you. You might start with "this moment" and end up writing about the gardenia you wore at your wedding seven years ago. That's fine. Don't try to control it. Stay present with whatever comes up, and keep your hand moving.
Natalie Goldberg
#48. Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style.
Nancy Kress
#49. When writing for children, it's important to keep in touch with our own inner child. What frightened them, made them happy, made them sad or angry?
C.J. Heck
#50. It's always a better choice to write a new book than it is to keep pounding your head against the submissions wall with a book that's just not happening. The next book you write could be the book, the one that isn't a fight to get representation for at all.
Diana Peterfreund
#51. The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.
Beverly Cleary
#52. Wherein we discover that many of the "rules" for good writing and good sex are the same: Keep your hand moving, lose control, and don't think.
Natalie Goldberg
#53. Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody.
E. J. W. Barber
#54. Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
Julie Kagawa
#55. Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees - boil vats and vats of raw sap - evaporate the water - and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence.
Dan Brown
#56. When I'm writing a novel, which is what I like to write, I get up early, sit zazen, make a pot of green tea. I wear wrist cuffs to keep my wrists warm and minimize irritation from extended contact with the surface of my desk. I sit down and write.
Ruth Ozeki
#57. Keep writing. Try to do a little bit every day, even if the result looks like crap. Getting from page four to page five is more important than spending three weeks getting page four perfect.
Alan Dean Foster
#58. If you want to be a writer, you have to keep writing, all the time, and when you're not writing, be thinking about and planning writing.
May J. Panayi
#59. People ask me all the time, "Where do your ideas come from?" So, to clear up this question ... I keep my ideas inside the mind of a tiny man who is tied up in my closet!
C.K. Webb
#60. Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.
Lou Reed
#61. A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.
Dan Chaon
#62. Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.
Ace Antonio Hall
#63. We expect to keep our writing sessions going until late spring, then to play some new material in a few secret club dates. The record will likely take a long time and may not surface until 1999!
Adrian Belew
#64. And then writing, it was like I just found it, you know? Like you just found your favorite flavor of ice cream, all of a sudden there it is. 'This is what I should have been doing for the last thirty years. What was I thinking?' So I was, then I was in and then I had to just keep going with it.
Stephenie Meyer
#66. I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line ...
Yukio Mishima
#68. 10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don't want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don't.
Write every day.
Keep writing.
Brian Clark
#69. The compulsion to read and write - and it seems to me it should be, even must be, a compulsion - is a bit of mental wiring the species has selected, over time, in order, as the life span increases, to keep us interested in ourselves.
Lorrie Moore
#70. I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published ... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.
Markus Zusak
#71. I'm working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn't possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I've tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there's nothing going on with football.
Gregg Easterbrook
#72. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.
Jean Rhys
#73. If you want to write, then write; if you don't want to write, then don't write. I fell into the former category, and I just made the decision that I'd keep on because I liked it and might someday do something decent.
Ben Fountain
#74. When you are lonely, writing can keep you company. It is also a form of self-compensation, a way of making up for things - as opposed to making things up - that did not quite happen.
Geoff Dyer
#75. The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.
Stephen Karam
#76. For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
#77. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself.
(Interview, New York Post Magazine, September 14, 1958)
Bernard Malamud
#78. When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.
Jennifer Donnelly
#79. I don't have any structured grand plan; I just intend to keep writing about the things that interest me-some of which change, some of which don't.
Greg Egan
#80. I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.
Bruce Springsteen
#81. As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going
James Richardson
#82. I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#83. I really like the Observer. I think I'd love to have a column with a broad reach that would enable me to do some proper reporting, but keep it on sort of a humorous level. I've always had a very happy experience writing for them.
Toby Young
#84. I have always hated flying. I mainly pass the time writing letters. I am very old school and I still keep many correspondences the old-fashioned way, via post.
Vaginal Davis
#85. Often times, I'm surprised by what I'm writing or what I'm playing, and then that inspires me to keep going with it, so it ends up being a very adventurous process.
Marketa Irglova
#86. Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.
Feist
#87. How can anyone underestimate the ballistic quality of words? Invisible things happen in intangible moments. What should keep us writing is precisely that possibility of explosions
Miguel Syjuco
#88. But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#89. When someone gives you advice, just ask them to give it in writing and they will either keep mum or will run from there.
Amit Kalantri
#90. Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.
Bob Mayer
#91. A watched pot never boils.
It's the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.
Christy Hall
#92. There is a difference between fresh and weird. You never want to throw your reader out of the story. Keep it fresh but natural.
Darynda Jones
#93. We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still
Henry David Thoreau
#94. So research is a terribly imperfect science, and you learn an awful lot more after you've published a book, because people keep writing to you and saying, 'Oh, gosh, I was related to such and such a character and I have a letter in my possession.'
Simon Winchester
#95. As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.
Susan Isaacs
#96. It's easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you'll keep improving.
Suzanne Weyn
#97. Don't keep your Muse locked up in the closet. Set them free to dance across the page and what they create will be a masterpiece.
Michelle C. Hillstrom
#98. My writing tends to become very dense, so I have to keep some cushion. Sometimes, words that seem superfluous are actually essential for the overall effect.
Gretchen Rubin
#99. The muse is fickle; ergo, when she knocks, ANSWER! It may take a while, but trust me, she WILL knock. In the meantime, keep your ear pressed firmly to the door.
Quentin R. Bufogle
#100. I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.
Maya Angelou
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