Top 100 Quotes About Writing Stories
#1. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.
P.G. Wodehouse
#2. I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.
Steve Earle
#3. Art was a way for me to express myself and for me to also escape because it was tough growing up as a child. We didn't have a lot of money. I was always creating. I was writing stories. I was doing comic books. I made my own universe.
Michelle Phan
#4. Every story I've written was written because I had to write it. Writing stories is like breathing for me; it is my life.
Ray Bradbury
#5. I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?
Dorothea Benton Frank
#7. One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.
Scarlett Thomas
#8. I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
Rodman Philbrick
#9. Writing stories has given me the power to change things I could not change as a child. I can make boys into doctors. I can make fathers stop drinking. I can make mothers stay.
Cynthia Rylant
#10. I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#11. I wasn't writing stories with the intention of creating a particular collection. I simply wrote stories, and then discovered common themes among a good number of them.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#13. I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.
Jennifer Fallon
#14. Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks.
Alice Munro
#15. I've always called myself a journalist who happens to draw. If I wasn't drawing cartoons, I'd be writing stories.
David Horsey
#16. I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.
Jimmy Breslin
#18. Those crazy physicists that spend all day cooking themselves under an atomic reactor and all night writing stories for Weird World have done it. Spoiled my day completely. One of those idiots has hung the world up like a celluloid ball in an airstream.
Shirley Jackson
#19. I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#20. I think anything we do - eating, walking down the street, online shopping - gives you another perspective on writing stories.
Peter Orner
#21. I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.
Haruki Murakami
#23. When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
Bat For Lashes
#24. I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
Tess Gerritsen
#25. What I've found as I have kept writing stories is that more and more your way is barred. I feel really choked by what I already know how to do, by the fact that my obsessions nearly always mount a sneak attack, so that I find myself writing another version of the same thing.
Catherine Brady
#26. Writing stories was always a bit like falling in love with a stranger and running off to Marrakech for a long weekend. It didn't have to be successful to be thrilling.
Ann Patchett
#27. But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
Patricia Cornwell
#28. Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,
Mark Haddon
#29. When I was younger, I liked writing stories and watching younger actors on TV.
Kiersey Clemons
#30. He's a hot bath, a short breath, five days of summer pressed into five fingers writing stories on my body.
Tahereh Mafi
#31. Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
#32. Never apologise for not being someone else. You're bound to find something you're good at, even if it's only writing stories.
Geraldine McCaughrean
#33. I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
Mary Karr
#34. He's a hot bath, a short breath, 5 days of summer pressed into 5 fingers writing stories on my body.
Tahereh Mafi
#35. Did you know that writing stories down kills them?
Of course it does, words aren't meant to be stiff, unchanging things.
N.K. Jemisin
#36. But then, that's the beauty of writing stories - each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.
[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]
T.C. Boyle
#37. Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.
Emma Donoghue
#38. The democratic race is really boring when the media is basically writing stories and spending money to ask questions in a poll about somebody who is not even a declared candidate.
Dana Perino
#39. I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.
Stephen King
#40. I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.
Jess Walter
#41. Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It's unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.
John Dufresne
#42. I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.
Don DeLillo
#43. For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
Sara Sheridan
#44. What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
Lisa Scottoline
#45. I started writing stories in my spare time.
Ken Follett
#46. I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons.
Rick Riordan
#47. I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
Blake Jenner
#48. I've been writing stories, in one form or another, since I was a kid.
Cullen Bunn
#49. I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.
Doreen Cronin
#50. Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you.
Scott Westerfeld
#51. Don't get me wrong, God Bless the farmers and cowboys. It just wasn't the life I wanted. When writing stories of other lands, I can describe people and places from actual experience. And for someone with an imagination like me, I could see dinosaurs and lost civilizations in the jungle of Vietnam.
Tom Johnson
#52. At eleven I was at the peak of my creative powers: I was writing stories and playlets, putting together poetryprojects. I was absorbed by my 'work.' At twelve I was no longer reading or writing, just counting off days and checking them off. I was interested in survival.
Todd Solondz
#53. We are writing stories with light and darkness, motion and colors. It is a language with its own vocabulary and unlimited possibilities for expressing our inner thoughts and feelings.
Vittorio Storaro
#54. I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.
Christine Feehan
#55. I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.
Xavier Dolan
#56. Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.
G. Willow Wilson
#57. Writing stories is like making love. --from Creating Juicy Tales
June Gillam
#58. I became an author because I love words. I enjoyed playing with them when I was a kid, writing stories and plays, and doing whatever I could think to do with words. I kept my love of them growing up and still love to see what they can do.
James Howe
#59. For me, writing stories is one way of feeling connected to the universe and God.
Elif Safak
#60. The one thing with writing stories about the rise of fascism is that if you wait long enough, you'll almost certainly be proved right. Fascism is like a hydra - you can cut off its head in the Germany of the '30s and '40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise.
Alan Moore
#61. Our country has the oldest tradition of storytelling, and this was much before writing stories even became a norm.
Ashwin Sanghi
#62. I've been writing stories since I was a kid. I love writing stories.
Randa Abdel-Fattah
#63. I love writing stories about regular people dealing with life's biggest questions.
Nick Blaemire
#64. Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Tobias Wolff
#65. Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough
Joy Williams
#67. You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.
Karen Russell
#68. I'm not so presumptuous to feel that they're gonna get it right away, get exactly what I have in mind. I hope that they'll enjoy looking at it at any rate, whatever it is. And that's why I started writing stories on my work.
Faith Ringgold
#69. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.
Gita V. Reddy
#70. Accept nothing. Challenge everything.
A.D. Posey
#72. I like to write about people who are real and likeable. I like to write about people who tell their stories in that close and intimate voice we use with best friends. I love the closeness and honesty and vulnerability that come from characters who can talk that way.
Katherine Center
#73. All stories come from the writer's heart, and all hearts speak the same language, a wordless language ancient as time, and for the writer, this is the eternal struggle, to translate the wordless into words.
Stan D. Jensen
#74. 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
#75. Semi-facetiously, when people ask me why I write these kinds of stories, I simply say that I was warped as a child. And, there is some truth to that.
Stephen King
#76. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#77. You will find the greatest happiness in letting yourself be.
A.D. Posey
#78. I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature.
Naguib Mahfouz
#79. The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.
Bob Shacochis
#80. We are storied folk. Stories are what we are; telling and listening to stories is what we do.
Arthur Kleinman
#81. I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
William T. Vollmann
#82. Stories that pander to your every readerly desire and whim are like overly loyal dogs that live for the simple glow of your approval. I'm a cat person. I like a little aloofness in my pets and my writing.
Alden Bell
#83. I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.
Meghan Daum
#84. I'm probably the most loquacious author when it comes to my dedications. The reason is there is some symbolism there. I've been writing these books, bringing these stories to my readers who I love so much, and I have a greater love for my family.
Karen Kingsbury
#85. One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
Sara Sheridan
#86. 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
#87. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#88. Don't look.
See.
Don't think.
Feel.
Don't hear.
Listen.
Pay attention
Miracles really do happen every day
A.D. Posey
#89. The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal.
Sally Odgers
#91. Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom.
A.D. Posey
#92. The voices in my head wouldn't shut up, so I let them write their story.
Shandy L. Kurth
#93. Writing is more than just a method to tell stories. It's a way to find healing, and to healing others.
M. Kirin
#94. I want to do some fiction writing, I've had some pretty good luck with short stories, I'd like to do a couple of larger things.
Janis Ian
#95. 'Castle' is a guy living in a fantasy world. He's in his imagination, writing these stories of murder.
Nathan Fillion
#96. I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.
Joss Whedon
#97. While we do have 50 years of terrific Avengers stories, many of which our writing staff has written, along the way, this has to live in its own world.
Jeph Loeb
#98. For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
Eudora Welty
#100. With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.
Irvin D. Yalom
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
