Top 100 Life Writing Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.
Donald Hall
#3. Reading a good book is an escape to an alternative life, writing a good book is the closest thing to actually living that life.
Chas Scott
#4. I don't feel that I wanted to spend my whole writing life - which is my life - writing detective stories.
Ruth Rendell
#5. I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.
Alan Furst
#6. I could spend the rest of my life writing and drawing books for kids and be a very happy man.
Daniel Sean Kaye
#7. For the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching ... by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.
Stephen King
#8. I think the hardest stories we tell are always the ones about ourselves. And as a journalist, I was taught that I'm never supposed to put myself in the story. So I spent what, 11, 12 years of my life writing about other people so I don't have to face my own life.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#9. Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.
James Shapiro
#10. Beware of writing to me. I always answer ... My father spent the last 20 years of his life writing letters. If someone thanked him for a wedding present, he thanked them for thanking him and there was no end to the exchange but death.
Evelyn Waugh
#11. Work controls my life, writing controls my life, performing controls my life.
Lemon Andersen
#12. The kind of true-life writing that is fun to read - that makes an ally of the reader - is the kind that you are so nervous about putting down on paper that you lock the Word file with a secret password and encrypt it - and all of it.
Julie Klausner
#13. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937
Samuel Beckett
#14. I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.
Norman Lock
#15. I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.
William, Saroyan
#16. At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.
Patrick DeWitt
#17. I'm going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I'm going to write the songs that people can't write for themselves.
Stevie Nicks
#18. I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.
Ignazio Silone
#19. And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?
Jonathan Safran Foer
#20. Do you like reading? It's the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.
Manuel Rivas
#21. I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?
Jill Talbot
#22. I started writing to save my life.
Joy Harjo
#23. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
#24. Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.
Louise Doughty
#25. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#26. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.
Lisa J. Shultz
#27. If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Russell Banks
#28. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#29. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
Samuel Colbran
#30. My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
Jenny Offill
#31. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#32. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
Andre Maurois
#33. I'm in love with writing, but sometimes I swear it hates me.
Buffy Andrews
#34. Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
#35. Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.
Joe Eszterhas
#36. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#37. Writing music on your own makes you think a lot about your life. Who are you? Would you change anything about yourself? This is where it comes from.
Enya
#38. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#39. Confront the page that taunts you with its whiteness. Face your enemy and fill it with words. You are bigger and stronger than a piece of paper.
Fennel Hudson
#40. The thrill of seeing my words on a printed page has never faded. Now I've found my niche, my passion. I want to do this every day for the rest of my life.
Marion Smith Collins
#41. The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.
Albert Einstein
#42. I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
Nicholas Sparks
#43. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
Samuel Colbran
#44. There is nothing to me but you. I know it's pathetic but, oh darling, it's true.
F.K. Preston
#45. There are a lot of writers, but only one YOU.
Pandora Gray
#46. As regards plot I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think a plot desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
#47. I write because that is what I am supposed to do.
Christy Hall
#48. With words ... one can cut & kill:but also one can cure and heal.
Darrius Garrett
#49. I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.
Anthony Trollope
#50. Write what you want to write; don't fear about who will read it.
Debasish Mridha
#51. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.
John Updike
#52. There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
Carla H. Krueger
#53. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#54. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.
Deborah Lawrenson
#55. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.
Katie Roiphe
#56. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.
Louisa May Alcott
#57. Writing is a lot like life, the more you learn the more you realize that you don't have a clue
Carl Henegan
#58. Like everyone else in this world, I have had struggles. There's disappointment and obstacles in everybody's life. I feel like I was writing 'Second Chance' not just for myself, but also for the people who have struggled.
El DeBarge
#59. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#61. I couldn't not write. Sometimes I ask myself, How do people get through life without writing? I write to calm anxiety, to process pain. Writing to me is reflection.
Andrew Holleran
#64. One thing that's paramount in my life is that I am alone. I'm a loner. And yet I have many friends and I don't feel lonely. And I even like my own company. But when I'm alone, it's to read or write. I'm in my thoughts. Mostly I'm learning.
Agnes Denes
#65. It is in writing of the emotions that style becomes most individual, in moments of passion, betrayal, of life and death.
Hallie Burnett
#66. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#67. When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.
Erin McKeown
#68. I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally. For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.
Barbara Christian
#69. I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#71. At the outset, I think that one should be natural, not just when it comes to writing but in every area of life. If you try to be something that you are not just to impress others, then it's a rather sad life.
Amish Tripathi
#72. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.
Avijeet Das
#73. The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
#74. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.
Natalie Goldberg
#75. Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.
Jim Beaver
#76. Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.
Julia Cameron
#77. Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements.
Guy Kawasaki
#78. It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
Truman Capote
#79. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#80. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#81. It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
#82. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#83. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#84. Writing can make life enjoyable, write your dreams....
Wanda Smith
#85. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#86. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#87. Once we start writing with a pen, we are not allowed to erase our mistakes, we are forced to deal with it.
Akansh Malik
#88. That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
Chuck Palahniuk
#89. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris West
#90. Anything designed to be inoffensive isn't worth your time
life itself is pretty offensive, ending as it does with death.
Holly Lisle
#92. I don't even do anything in real life. I just sit in my studio and write, I call my friends, I watch television. I don't do anything.
Lana Del Rey
#93. When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook - a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
Virginia Woolf
#94. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
#95. Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.
Jacques Villeneuve
#96. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
#97. I want your loves to be multiple. I don't want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it.
Ray Bradbury
#98. In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life.
Kelis
#99. Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley Kubrick
#100. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.
Kerry Washington
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