Quotes About Writing About Yourself

#1. One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

Kate Grenville

#2. Young writers reasonably say, 'I don't know what to write about,' so writing about yourself is a very literal way to begin.

Susanna Moore

#3. I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

Mary Karr

#4. If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.

Jim Rash

#5. Learn from your existence and borrow things from your day to day. Have adventures. Take risks. Put yourself into your fiction. Because life offers a kind of writing advice you just can't read about
it's something only you can experience.

Chuck Wendig

#6. It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

Doris Lessing

#7. Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

Tony Kushner

#8. You get no writing done at all if you sit at a table with a view. You'd spent the whole time watching the birds or thinking about what you would like to be doing out of doors, instead of flogging yourself to work out of sheer boredom.

Mary Stewart

#9. Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

Terrence McNally

#10. It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

Clive James

#11. Writing is about allowing yourself to become a vessel of creativity. Writers are avatars of creation. We have tender hearts, and strong emotions. It's hard not to when you have a million different people's personalities playing out in your head.

Sai Marie Johnson

#12. Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.

Melinda Rucker Haynes

#13. When you're writing personal stories, you have to be totally uncompromising - to the extent that you can be - about yourself. I know that if I am uber-uncompromising with myself, that gives me some latitude to write about others.

Rob Lowe

#14. In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

Robert Penn Warren

#15. Never sit staring at a blank page or screen. If you find yourself stuck, write. Write about the scene you're trying to write. Writing about is easier than writing, and chances are, it will give you your way in.

Laini Taylor

#16. The good news about self publishing is you get to do everything yourself. The bad news about self publishing is you get to do everything yourself.

Lori Lesko

#17. I've always thought it was arrogant to write about yourself, particularly when you're still alive.

Russell Means

#18. Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

Eugene O'Neill

#19. Why cast yourself over a cliff, deciding in your writings about things of which you are ignorant? Why do you not keep to what you have received from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church? You introduce novelties!

Eusebius

#20. A non-event ... is better to write about than an event, because with a non-event you can make up the meaning yourself, it means whatever you say it means.

Margaret Atwood

#21. You can write better about a place you've seen for yourself. You don't have to have been there - I've sure written about places I've never seen - but it does help.

Harry Turtledove

#22. When you write a song it's sometimes in a desperate moment whn you can't really articulate it. What I love about lyrics is what T.S. Eliot said: 'Good poetry is felt before it is heard.' I'm a believer in that. It's those moments when you sit yourself down, and talk to yourself in the mirror.

Marcus Mumford

#23. The fact of the matter is that you should really stop concerning yourself with writing a book because anyone can write a book that totally sucks. There is nothing special about that.

Ashly Lorenzana

#24. When you're speaking or writing to someone, pause and ask yourself, "Is this something I want to create?" If it isn't, change your words. Focus on the positive and talk about the world as you want it to be, not as it is.

Elizabeth Daniels

#25. I used to give her [my wife] to read the column every week before I sent it to the editors. And sometimes she was so mad - are you crazy? You're not going to send that, or, you're not going to write that about me. So I would go, OK. You have five hours. Go ahead, write the column yourself.

Sayed Kashua

#26. When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.

Leo Ornstein

#27. When you accomplish a goal, don't cross it out. Instead, write 'victory' next to it and move on to the next one. This way, whenever you have a bad day, all you have to do is to review your victories to feel good about yourself.

Jack Canfield

#28. The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.

Jeanette Michelle

#29. I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

Ron Rash

#30. Never believe anything you think about yourself as a writer when you're not writing.

David Milch

#31. Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.

Tracy Chevalier

#32. I think it's really boring, from the point of view of the novelist, to write about yourself. Tedious. But that's very hard to explain to people who really don't believe in the possibility of invention.

Peter Carey

#33. Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

Anne Lamott

#34. Freedom. Writing should be all about freedom. Free yourself from societal constraints when you write. Create true Art.

Isabeau Kelm

#35. Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face.

Guy Kawasaki

#36. Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You'll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I'm still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don't worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.

Frank McCourt

#37. Let life be the foundation. Be brave. Wander deep inside yourself to the little room no one knows about. Fling the door wide open and write.

Christy Hall

#38. If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.

Barbara Baig

#39. As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.

Richard Thompson

#40. You can never know too much about writing. If you think you know everything, you're not leaving yourself open to learn ... The best writers are always learning, exploring, and trying to improve.

Sabrina Jeffries

#41. The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

George R R Martin

#42. Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

Ted Hughes

#43. Writing is mostly a mind game. It's about tricking yourself into becoming who you are. If you do this long enough, you begin to believe it. And pretty soon, you start acting like it.

Jeff Goins

#44. But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be.

David Cronenberg

#45. With writing, I think you have to be honest with yourself. I have a certain kind of writing; that is, I like to really embellish the human spirit. You have to write about something you have a feel for.

Sylvester Stallone

#46. It's hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it's also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.

Tim Kreider

#47. Write 100 things that you love about your partner. It's another way of keeping yourself in check. It's hard to do.

Chris Pirillo

#48. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing - your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

David Foster Wallace

#49. I've been acting for so long it's more like - I won't say easy, exactly, but there's not the same angst with writing that comes about with acting. Writing - particularly when you're writing yourself, when it's you, when it's your life, you really can't hide.

Molly Ringwald

#50. When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

Margaret Mahy

#51. A writer's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one word, one sentence, one phrase at a time.

C.J. Heck

#52. A runner's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time. It's the same for a writer ...

C.J. Heck

#53. Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.

Rebecca Skloot

#54. Surely the whole point of writing your own life story is to be as honest as you possibly can, revealing everything about yourself that is most private and probably most interesting for that very reason.

Judith Krantz

#55. For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.

Louis Menand

#56. The stranger might laugh and seem to enjoy the writing, but you hug to yourself the thought that they didn't quite understand its force and quality the way you do - just as your friends (thank heavens) don't also fall in love with the person you are going on and on about to them.

Stephen Fry

#57. Why wouldn't you write to escape yourself as much as you might write to express yourself? It's far more interesting to write about others.

Susan Sontag

#58. Habits of an empowerED teacher: "read, notice, think, make theories about how writing works, imagine possibilities, write yourself; it isn't magic, it's just slow, creative work.

Penny Kittle

#59. Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.

Ray Bradbury

#60. Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

Yann Martel

#61. Look inside yourself and you'll find a world of things (a world of your own experiences)worth writing about.

Bette Greene

#62. What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.

John Connolly

#63. Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.

Johnny Vegas

#64. The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.

Peter Gould

#65. I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and then when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all." ~ Mrs. Oliver

Agatha Christie

#66. If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

Poppy Z. Brite

#67. Who were my fictitious witches and what did they mean? Never ask that of yourself while writing. It may stop you cold. Just trust that if you believe in your characters, others will too. ... Whenever I thought too critically about my work, I couldn't write.

Erica Jong

#68. I often fear to talk so occasionally I express my opinions and my love in writing.

Debasish Mridha

#69. Kids love me because I write stories that tell them about their capacity for evil. I'm one of the few writers who lets you cleanse yourself that way.

Ray Bradbury

#70. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.

Robin Sacredfire

#71. Sometimes writing about a TV show, or a movie, or a book, is the most honest way to write about yourself.

Aaron Burch

#72. How do you write when you're not miserable? The solution, of course, is to make yourself miserable about not writing.

Jerry Stahl

#73. You're too busy writing the next book to worry about Googling yourself all the time.

Annette Curtis Klause

#74. 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

#75. I've heard Stephen King say that when you write a novel you end up revealing everything about yourself.

Ernest Cline

#76. I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.

Avi

#77. You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Doris Lessing

#78. I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.

Toby Emmerich

#79. He hung a patient expression on his face, the kind usually seen on people who talked about releasing your anger and surrounding yourself with good feelings while writing off anyone who disagreed with them as unenlightened.

Amy Fecteau

#80. In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.

Sherman Alexie

#81. Self-discovery in songwriting, bringing something forth that's instructive to yourself - some of the best songs that you will ever write are the ones where you didn't have to think about any of that stuff, but nonetheless that's what's happening in the song.

Jackson Browne

#82. Don't fool yourself. Talking about writing is not the same as actually doing it.

Christy Hall

#83. What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.

August Wilson

#84. You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading.

Elizabeth Hoyt

#85. Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph, until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety - it's the job.

Roddy Doyle

#86. The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

Augusten Burroughs

#87. With six weeks' worth of recuperation time, you'll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. And listen
if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.

Stephen King

#88. Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Anne Lamott

#89. You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

Roger Kahn

#90. The great thing about writing: Stay with it ... ultimately you teach yourself something very important about yourself.

Bernard Malamud

#91. The personal screenplay- where you dive into the terrifying depths of your soul, unearth the most intimate details about yourself, and put it on paper for the world to see. Proceed with caution, for madness lies ahead.

A.D. Posey

#92. I always think [W.S.] Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.

Billy Collins

#93. Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?

Jerry Spinelli

#94. The positive thing about writing is that you connect with yourself in the deepest way. You get a chance to know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a relationship with your mind.

Natalie Goldberg

#95. Having an attack of self-doubt about your writing ability?

Step #1 - Tell yourself - 'I'm the best damn writer there is, and the world deserves to hear my voice.'

Step #2 - Repeat Step #1 until you believe it.

Jonathan Maas

#96. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

Flannery O'Connor

#97. ... writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them.

Steve Almond

#98. I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Michael Redhill

#99. What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.

Cornelius Eady

#100. The best things about writing are the freedom to please yourself creatively, personal accomplishment and the journey of personal growth. The worst is that you alone own the criticism and blame.

Ron Houston