Top 93 Quotes On How To Write A Book
#1. First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
Anne Rice
#3. I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.
Hannah Kent
#4. Give someone a book, they'll read for a day. Teach someone how to write a book, they'll experience a lifetime of paralyzing self doubt.
Lauren DeStefano
#5. One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can't write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book
David McCullough
#6. To write a book is for all the world like humming a song - be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.
Laurence Sterne
#7. I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished.
Haruki Murakami
#8. The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?
Bruce Chatwin
#9. I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell.
Paula Danziger
#10. Dear Judy Blume, why didn't you write a book about how to survive talking to your centuries-old, super-duper experienced, smoking-hot soul mate about sex for the first time ever? That book would have been extremely helpful in preparing me for this incredibly awkward situation.
Karen Amanda Hooper
#11. It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.
Stephen Graham Jones
#12. A writer is a person who writes.
Actually, it was John Braine's quote in his book HOW TO WRITE A NOVEL. But I use it all the time
Andrew Puckett
#13. I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.
Gore Vidal
#14. How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".
Shubham Choudhary
#15. How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.
Edward Abbey
#16. I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#17. Once I came to really understand the mechanics of three-act structure, my life got a great deal easier. It doesn't tell you how to write your book, but it helps you understand why things aren't working, or what kind of beat needs to come next.
Marcus Sakey
#18. I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.
Junot Diaz
#19. But hereby resolve to write in this book at least twenty minutes a night. (If discouraged, just think of how much will have been recorded for posterity after one mere year!) (September 5) Oops. Missed a day.
George Saunders
#20. 'How long do you want me to stay in there so you can talk about me behind my back?' Zak called.
'A couple of hours. I could write a book about you,' Logan shot back.
'Make sure you make it clear my dick's bigger than yours.'
Barbara Elsborg
#21. No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.
Cassandra Clare
#22. I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.
James Frey
#23. You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.
Ellen DeGeneres
#24. When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.
Jim Butcher
#25. I am afraid to write this book, but if I did not step back into that place of darkness, I would run the risk of forgetting who I was and, as a result, lose perspective on how far I've come. I
G.H. Francis
#26. Until I became a published writer, I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject ... they would have spoiled my natural style; made me observe caution; would have hedged me with rules.
Isaac Asimov
#27. I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career.
Drew Carey
#28. I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the "the murderer" has changed little in over a hundred years, and to argue that this "exceptional figure" serves a conservative function in modern culture that bears closer interrogation than it has commonly received.
Richard Marshall
#29. I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.
Anthony Horowitz
#30. IF you wish to be a writer then don't wait until you write the "great American novel" for they aren't written they are created. If you don't write at all you won't know how "great" that simple book can be.
Shiree McCarver
#31. But how do I get to having to write a book? ... It was a mother who bore me, not an inkwell!
Robert Musil
#32. I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.
Sarah MacLean
#33. Every time I write a book, I think how I could be doing it better to please people - a nicer book with nicer characters - but I just can't.
John Burnside
#34. Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.
Gilbert Morris
#35. After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#36. If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.
Misha Collins
#37. I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.
Corey Haim
#38. But then of course you reach a point where you have to say, I've got to figure out how this book's going to end. Otherwise, you're going to write yourself into so many dead-ends.
Anthony Doerr
#39. I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.
Jenny Lawson
#40. I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.
Norton Juster
#42. When you decide to write and publish a book, you go into business - no matter how you publish that book. You enter the publishing business, which is the business of selling books. Consider your book the foundation of your business.
Nina Amir
#43. There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
Terry Brooks
#44. -"-A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge."
-"If you knew how little you had to revenge...".
Graham Greene
#45. Every day I create a new color study using an online or mobile app. So, I decided to write a book on Applying Color Theory to Digital Media and Visualization to teach others how easy it is and the joy in doing their own color studies.
Theresa-Marie Rhyne
#46. I learned that you can't write a book in the margins of your life. I'd forgotten how much uninterrupted time it takes to write chapters, and how you have to push everything else aside and really focus.
Melissa Harris-Perry
#47. For years I've wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for 'The Keepsake' occurred to me: what if an 'ancient' mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?
Tess Gerritsen
#48. I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.
Mary Karr
#49. The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
James Rollins
#50. I write the book for one person - for Fiona [Staples, the artist]. I spend a lot of time just thinking how she'll react to things and manipulating her into drawing perverse, horrific things. It's a really weird job but I enjoy it.
Brian K. Vaughan
#51. Everyone should write a book, if only to see
how much work goes into even the slight volume I send you.
Susan Wallace
#52. If you've never experienced something and don't know how to write about it, then make it a fantasy book. It gives you a lot of freedom.
B.A. Gabrielle
#53. I write what I want and how I want. Reviews do not need to be condescending nor do they need to tell me to read your book (if you're a fellow author). Either you like the books or you don't. That's all there is to it.
Amanda Byrd
#54. One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself.
Rose Macaulay
#55. [On The Catcher in the Rye] "This Salinger, he's a short story guy. And he knows how to write about kids. This book though, it's too long. Gets kind of monotonous. And he should've cut out a lot about these jerks and all that crumby school. They depress me. - James Stern
The New York Times
#56. To see how boring you really are, write a book about soap and cults, and the profits you make will be your only means of subsistence.
Chuck Palahniuk
#57. It's being a grown up, which I never figured out how to do, scrubbing the tub, and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#58. As we all saw in grade school, once you learn how to read a book, somebody is going to want to write one - that's how authors are made. Once we know how to read our own genetic code, someone is going to want to rewrite that 'text,' tinker with traits - play God, some would say.
Gregory Benford
#59. One of the way to get attention is to write a book titled, How to get attention.
Vikrmn
#60. Everyone has a book within them. Everyone has to write it thinking, 'How will I help other people? What will the book do to touch lives?'
Joachim De Posada
#61. I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Evelyn Waugh
#62. I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
Charles De Lint
#63. In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.
Evan Osnos
#64. When writing a book, don't think about who is going to see it. Write about how you feel in the moment. Don't let a good idea get away.
B.A. Gabrielle
#65. I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.
Robert A. Heinlein
#66. One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
Justin Cronin
#67. I think it's very, very, very hard to get a book published. I never want to be one of those teachers that say, 'don't do this, ' because how sad would the world be if people didn't create art and write? But, it's not an easy journey being a writer.
Alyson Richman
#68. I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
Robert Caro
#69. I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'
Dick Van Dyke
#70. 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
#71. I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.
Patrick Duffy
#72. You can write a book on how to ruin someone's perfect day.
Taylor Swift
#73. I wanted to be of service to the Peace League, and how could I better do so than by trying to write a book which should propagate its ideas? And I could do it most effectively, I thought, in the form of a story.
Bertha Von Suttner
#74. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I'm as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.
Rachel Kushner
#75. Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.
John Boyne
#76. It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.
P.G. Wodehouse
#77. When I made the leap from category romance to larger single-title books, I was encouraged to make the book 'big,' and suspense was allowed. Over the years, I've been able to write the kind of books I love, with a balance of suspense and romance. How lucky am I?
Lisa Jackson
#78. The next time something happens to your car, make a note as to what you feel the broken part represents and see if you can connect it to how you are feeling at that particular moment. You may be surprised at the results. One day I will write a little book and call it Heal Your Automobile.
Louise L. Hay
#79. In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."
Thomas L. Dumm
#80. I'm asking the questions tonight. One day I was going to write a book: How to Dictate to a Dictator
and Evade an Evader, subtitled How to Handle Jericho Barrons.
Karen Marie Moning
#81. I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
Robert E. Howard
#82. I'd set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety. What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations
Heather Sellers
#83. I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.
Tom Robbins
#85. Here's the million-dollar question: how are you going to write this book if you're afraid to start writing? Give your friend Doubt a name, and then block his calls.
Kami Garcia
#86. I always try to give good ratings to books I have read unless it is really bad. Being a writer I know how a bad rating feels. Sometimes it is better to encourage a writer rather than discourage them. After all the next book they write could be a World Renown novel like Harry Potter.
William Roach
#87. The only way to write a book, I'm fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That's how you write a book.
Anne Enright
#88. Unless you bring a beating heart into your message, it is dead' (Author unknown)
That's why I wrote my how-to book, "Don't Write your MEmoir without ME". If there's no "this is me" in your memoir, it won't resonate with your readers the way you hope it will.
Viga Boland
#89. Someone should write a book about how Alice Liddell from Wonderland falls in love with Huckleberry Finn. I might rather want to read that book.
Heather Lyons
#90. People generally don't recognize how long it takes to conceive, publish, and write a book.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#91. I didn't want to write a 'this is how it is' Iraq book, because the Iraq War is an intensely complicated variety of things.
Phil Klay
#92. Writing is a bit like swimming. You learn writing by doing it and you learn swimming by doing it. Nobody learns how to swim by reading a book about swimming and nobody learns how to write by reading a book about writing. If you want to learn how to write, write a lot and you will get better at it.
Robert Munsch
#93. Memoirs? No, we want a how-to book. For spies." "A how-to book?! A book can't teach someone how to be equal parts deadly and sexy! That's like asking a cobra to write a book about how to be a cobra!
Sterling Archer
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