Top 100 Quotes About Writing Page
#1. I'm trying to read/edit my story as if I have no existing knowledge of the story, no investment in it, no sense of what Herculean effort went into writing page 23, no pretensions as to why the dull patch on page 4 is important for the fireworks that will happen on page 714.
George Saunders
#2. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#3. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing - that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.
Markus Zusak
#7. And the reason you hate writing so much is because you start analyzing your work before you're done pouring it onto the page. Your Left-brain won't let your Right-brain do it's job ... Your Right-brain gets the words on the page. The Left-brain makes them sing.
Jeff Bollow
#8. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#9. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Jonathan Franzen
#10. I'm in a business where there's complete anarchy. You can't control it - you can only react to it. The control that people traditionally had over their message is gone. Look at Wikileaks: you have to approach everything you write on the basis it's going to be on the front page of the newspaper.
Martin Sorrell
#11. Anything John Stott says is worth listening to. Anything he writes is worth reading. Basic Christianity is not only a classic must-read for every believer; it is truly a blessing preserved on the written page for the enrichment of this generation and those to come.
Anne Graham Lotz
#12. The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower.
Bankei Yotaku
#13. Jerusalem, 61 AD Mariamne dipped her reed pen into the shallow wooden bowl of charcoal and olive oil ink and began writing her last entry on the parchment page in front of her.
Jerry Harber
#14. I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.
James Frey
#15. I let the memories flood me as I fill one page. Then another. And then I'm not even writing about him anymore. I'm writing about me.
Gayle Forman
#16. The writing in Mission to Paris, sentence after sentence, page after page, is dazzling. If you are a John le Carr fan, this is definitely a novel for you.
James Patterson
#17. Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
Geoff Dyer
#18. The way the word sinks
into the deep snow of the page
Gregory Orr
#19. I love words. I crave descriptions that overwhelm my imagination with vivid detail. I dwell on phrases that make my heart thrum. I cherish expressions that pierce my emotions and force the tears to spill over. In essence, I long for a writer's soul sealed in ink on the page.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#21. Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.
Langston Hughes
#22. Don't for once ever think that what you're doing is easy. If it feels that way, you're probably doing something wrong. Throwing words onto a page is easy. But writing, the real kind, is hard. It's damn hard.
Allison M. Dickson
#23. My experiences always influence my writing, but usually only on an emotional level. I have experienced death of a family member and it's easy to dredge up those feelings and get them on the page.
Kim Smith
#24. Sometimes I write less than I'd like but do research. Other times, editor's notes or a copy-edited manuscript or page proofs for a forthcoming novel mean that I need to put my attentions elsewhere for a day or two, but I always come back to writing.
Jane Lindskold
#25. The person you are (in total, at that moment in time) is what creates the story you're writing. It's infused in every piece of punctuation, in the plot, in the most minor character who crosses the page. It's all your voice.
Victor LaValle
#26. Everybody is born with a little bit of writer in them. We all come with the desire to work hard to see our creations come to life on the page. But it is those who choose to do something about this passion that has been ignited inside of them that are true writers.
Brian A. McBride
#27. A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.
Shirley Hazzard
#29. When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.
Roddy Doyle
#30. The best tip for writing is just to write; to sit down and write, to begin doing it and not to be scared by the blank page.
David Almond
#31. Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.
Andrea Seigel
#32. I hate writing about personal stuff. I don't have a Facebook page. I don't use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don't use them.
Elon Musk
#33. I am writing a book. I have got the page numbers done.
Stephen Wright
#34. I always remember writing a page of jokes for a comedian and handing it to him backstage at a club and he read it and then took his cigarette lighter and lit the page on.
Garry Marshall
#35. No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
Anne Waldman
#36. I'd turned to writing because it offered few escape routes or hiding places; it's harder to lie to yourself on the page than in the world.
Pico Iyer
#37. I look at words as if they were entities, sacred beings. There are words to which I tip my hat when I see them sitting on a page.
William Luce
#38. 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
#39. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.
Gretel Ehrlich
#40. I think that one is constantly startled by the things that appear before you on the page when you're writing.
Shirley Hazzard
#41. There are rhythmic ideas which sometimes only work up to a point. In writing there are moments when it just comes off the page, it's not just a collection of notes.
Harrison Birtwistle
#42. It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things ...
Aimee Bender
#43. First you have nothing, and then, astonishingly, after ripping out your brain and your heart and betraying your friends and ex-lovers and dreaming like a zombie over the page till you can't see or hear or smell or taste, you have something.
T.C. Boyle
#44. When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.
Michael Morpurgo
#45. How is your writing going, Michael?"
"Still from the top of the page on down, Mrs. Raglan.
Frederic Raphael
#46. When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.
Betsy Byars
#47. Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.
Sarah Colliver
#48. The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.
Italo Calvino
#49. The story I had written wasn't the creased, stit-smeared paper now sitting in the bottom of the trash can on the street. That page was just a pipeline through which I could transmit my feelings from my minds to his.
Etgar Keret
#51. 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
#52. One thing I knew about the novelist's task: when in doubt, write; when empty, write; when afraid, write. Nothing is more impenetrable than the blank page. The blank page is the void, the absence of sense and feeling, the white light of literary death.
Philip Sington
#53. When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#54. I can't compose or play music; I'm not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I'm doing either of these things I realize that I've written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn't absolutely know I had in me ... until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. Ignore all advice about writing. Leave your blood on every page. Every page!
Miriam Toews
#56. He was intrigued by the power of words, not the literary words that filled the books in the library but the sharp, staccato words that went into the writing of news stories. Words that went for the jugular. Active verbs that danced and raced on the page.
Robert Cormier
#57. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.
Denise Duhamel
#58. 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
#59. Little notes, scrawled on half-sheets of paper, and letters, when he was away, page after page, intimate, their news. Her voice, echoing through the house, and down the garden, careless and familiar like the writing in the book.
And I had to call him Maxim.
Daphne Du Maurier
#60. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
George Orwell
#61. The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.
Ezra Pound
#62. In my heart, I love books, I love writing. I love the lines of letters on a page.
Jaclyn Dolamore
#63. I do not worship the devil. But magic does intrigue me. Magic of all kinds. I bought Crowley's house to go up and write in. The thing is, I just never get up that way. Friends live there now.
Jimmy Page
#64. One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.
Lucy Larcom
#65. Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.
Anne Enright
#66. Nothing in the world is like this-
a bright white page with
pale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencil
the soft hush of it
moving finally
one day
into letters.
Jacqueline Woodson
#67. If you haven't heard a rumor by noon, make one up. If you're a writer, make sure it's a full page of the book you're currently working on.
Lamont Tanksley
#68. Harrison wrote a two-page poem about his deep feelings of loss when his dog Filbert died, and Mrs. Minerva, the creative writing teacher, gave it a B-minus. Do you know what that does to a a person to get a B-minus in Grief?
Joan Bauer
#69. When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn't writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around.
Ken Kesey
#70. Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.
Patricia Reilly Giff
#71. In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Cesare Pavese
#72. From my writer's workshop, Know when it's time to put everything you've got on the page. Then, rip open a vein and do it!
Heather Burch
#73. Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.
Rebecca Miller
#74. Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.
Alberto Manguel
#75. The writer and his reader are both complicit in the act of storytelling. The writer must first leave a part of his soul on the page,like a contagion, which the reader then catches.
Cynthia Ogren
#76. Writing is a solitary business. It's just you and your characters and a blank page you need to fill.
Shannon Celebi
#77. When I write a page that reads badly I know that it is myself who has written it. When it reads well it has come through from somewhere else.
Gerald Brenan
#78. Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#79. Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.
Athol Fugard
#80. With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.
Ian Frazier
#81. The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.
Jilly Cooper
#82. When writing screenplays, it's a matter of remembering to leave off the page anything and everything that doesn't appear on the screen.
Taiye Selasi
#83. A blank page has more power than a full page with blind thoughts.
Debasish Mridha
#84. Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen
#85. Julian Fellowes doesn't come to the set, except maybe once every six weeks, for whatever reason. He's not a producer, in that sense. But if you write him a one-line question, he'll write you a three-page answer.
Hugh Bonneville
#86. Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
Janet Burroway
#87. It's the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.)
Christopher Hitchens
#88. I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.
Aaron Sorkin
#89. I'm pretty disciplined to keep the momentum of a story going by writing everyday, even if it's only a couple paragraphs or a page or two.
James Rollins
#90. Writing isn't necessarily a gift it is a passion. You can write a one page masterpiece to 99 pages of crap. What keeps you coming back is that Zen moment when you enlightened your own self with a few cleverly arranged words and saved yourself a $200 trip to the shrink, by simply buying a #2 pencil.
Shannon L. Alder
#91. Writing is not about the voices in your head, but the voices that make the great leap to the page.
J.H. Glaze
#92. Constant rejection. No security. Career paths being dictated by freelance reviewers. And of course, the terror of the writing desk, of the blank page. Why is it so hard for our non-writer friends to understand this - that it's a job?
Darin Strauss
#93. Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a "life-is-like-this" on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.
Chila Woychik
#94. I remember the excruciating school task of writing a three-page term paper. But, oh, that feeling when I was done! I think I drive myself for that feeling of accomplishment.
Jimmy Buffett
#95. After writing a page, Hemingway would let it float to the ground. He never crumpled pages - he believed that if you crumpled them, you'd be insane in a year.
Clive Owen
#96. Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.
Stephen Dobyns
#97. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#98. I remember looking at James Joyce's journals. It was just amazing - it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.
Juan Felipe Herrera
#99. Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.
Chace Crawford
#100. Most writing doesn't take place on the page; it takes place in your head.
Susan Orlean
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