Successful Writing Quotes

#1. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.

Kevin J. Anderson

#2. Writers and musicians know well the importance of extensive reading for successful writing or extensive listening for musical composition. Likewise, visual artists ... understand that successful artistic creativity depends upon extensive visual exposure.

Paul Laseau

#3. The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.

Stephen Greenblatt

#4. I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

James Gunn

#5. Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

Don Roff

#6. To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace.

Virginia Henley

#7. The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.

Evan Esar

#8. Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.

Bonnie Friedman

#9. I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

#10. The most fascinating thing to me about your letter is that buried beneath all the anxiety and sorrow and fear and self-loathing, there's arrogance at its core. It presumes you should be successful at twenty-six, when really it takes most writers much longer to get there.

Cheryl Strayed

#11. Any advice for how to be a successful author?"
"Yes. Don't be a woman. And be dead. And do both at the same time, if you can.

Michelle Franklin

#12. Writing a book is a way of thinking to me, the only way of thinking that I have found successful.

Ruth Ozeki

#13. The difficulty of writing a second novel is directly proportional to how successful the first novel was, it seems.

Khaled Hosseini

#14. The secret of successful journalism is to make your readers so angry they will write half your paper for you.

C.E.M. Joad

#15. People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars.

Ernest Hemingway,

#16. The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

Dr. Seuss

#17. If everyone could be a successful and rich author, there would be no point in working so hard. Where is the fun in that?

L.A. Jones

#18. If you want to write a book that's very successful and famous, then it's hard. If you just want to get published, all you have to do is convince an editor that your idea will make them money.

Kate Cary

#19. Writing is successful schizophrenia because I'm paid to hear voices in my head.

Jodi Picoult

#20. Especially when writers are just starting out, the emphasis should be not only upon what they write, but equally upon the process of writing. A successful class is a class where no one feels that 'writer's block' is a high-priority subject.

Mary Oliver

#21. What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.

Miyoko Hikiji

#22. Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.

Catherine Tate

#23. Above all things
read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Ngaio Marsh

#24. If you want to be a successful writer you have to put your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard and put words on the page. Even shitty words are better than no words. You can go back and fix them later.

Liliana Hart

#25. The rules seem to be these: If you have written a successful novel, everyone invites you to write short stories. If you have written some good short stories, everyone wants you to write a novel. But nobody wants anything until you have already proved yourself by being published somewhere else.

James A. Michener

#26. For a successful writer, the secret is to have many irons in the fire. Write the next thing.

Jon Spaihts

#27. The most important rules that I ever adopted to help me in achieving my goals were those I learned from a very successful man who taught me to first write down the goal, and then to never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.

Tony Robbins

#28. I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

Elena Ferrante

#29. You don't have to be successful on a grand scale like winning a talent competition or writing a New York Times bestseller - if you have enough small things that you can be successful at then eventually they outshine all your failures.

Lindsey Rietzsch

#30. I'm a writer who stacks cat food for a living. It's true: I have a master's degree in creative writing, I've published two critically successful books, and I get paid to replenish the shelves of my local food co-op with pet food, sponges and toilet paper. Nine days out of 10, I do it quite happily.

Ali Liebegott

#31. You don't create or write to be successful; you don't create or paint to be famous or to increase your wealth. You do all of these things because your soul is calling you to do them.

Kelly Martin

#32. To be successful in writing, use short sentences.

Ernest Hemingway,

#33. You are happy and kind; therefore, you are successful.

A.D. Posey

#34. I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.

Steven Michael Quezada

#35. Those books of mine that are remunerative - I'm not talking about poetry here - take years to write, and I am never sure they'll be successful. So writing is a risk in more senses than one.

Vikram Seth

#36. When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic.
[As quoted on WritersServices, 6 March 2012]

Susanna Clarke

#37. I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn't very easy for anybody. He's made it successful on top of that.

Dolph Lundgren

#38. There's only one good reason to be a writer-we can't help it! We'd all like to be rich, famous and successful, but if those are our goals, we're off on a wrong foot ... I just wanted to earn enough money so I could work at home on my writing.

Phyllis A. Whitney

#39. I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there.

Isabel Allende

#40. The secret of being a successful writer is
write. Every writer deserves that chance.

Millicent Ashby

#41. It is a mean thief or a successful author that plunders the dead.

Austin O'Malley

#42. Fiction writing was in my blood from a very young age, but I never considered writing as a real career. I thought you had to have some literary pedigree to be a successful author, the son of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.

James Rollins

#43. Ridley Pearson also plays bass guitar and sings with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band made up of such successful authors as Amy Tan, Stephen King, and Dave Barry-a band that, according to Barry, "plays music as well as Metallica writes novels".

Otto Penzler

#44. The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

Gene Fowler

#45. Sourav is a very positive captain. Whatever his personal form, whatever the media writes about him, he has always been strong, focused and aggressive. Perhaps these are the qualities that make him India's most successful captain.

Virender Sehwag

#46. And what happened was, it's the same thing an older, more successful writer of ficition might say to a student: write about what you know. And what I knew - of course I knew jazz, but I also knew country, blues and some rock and roll. And that came out.

Larry Coryell

#47. When I graduated college, I had a fairly successful weekly club gig and was buying more studio equipment and writing my own music. I realized I didn't want to work.

Kaskade

#48. A good book is not the same as a successful one.

Johnny Rich

#49. The thing about writing in America is that writers in America have an arc. You enter writing as a career, you expect to be successful, and really it's the wrong thing. It's not a profession.

Jamaica Kincaid

#50. It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.

Dani Shapiro

#51. Successful journals break the deadlock of introspective obsession

Alexandra Johnson

#52. You're successful if you can get one person to pick it up and put it on the turntable and go, Wow, thanks for writing that!

Dan Fogelberg

#53. I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

Steve Capus

#54. Writing on assignment, with lots of money handed to you before you even began, got very scary for me. My dread of not being perfect, something I got from a childhood surrounded by powerful, successful people, began to infect everything I wrote.

Stewart Stern

#55. There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

Nicholas Sparks

#56. Writing a journal article combines all the elements that deter motivation: The probability of success is low; the likelihood of criticism and rejection is high; and the outcome, even if successful, isn't always rewarding.

Paul J. Silvia

#57. What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.

Katy Lederer

#58. You want to write a book for so many reasons ... The main reason ... is because it will make you well-known and beloved and popular and successful and famous and respected. You also write ... to make money, but that motivation is not first on the list.

Helen Gurley Brown

#59. Writing a successful novel is a great challenge, and you have to be a bit of a poet, a bit of a critic, a bit of a dramatist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a social scientist, to pull it off.

Anis Shivani

#60. I know that the way to be a really successful writer is to write the same kind of book over and over again. Find the kind of thing that people like and just write one of those over and over again. I don't do that. I just keep doing different things.

Neil Gaiman

#61. I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was number one on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.

Jacqueline Briskin

#62. When I was writing the Destiny's Child songs, it was a big thing to be that young and taking control. And the label at the time didn't know that we were going to be that successful, so they gave us all control. And I got used to it.

Beyonce Knowles

#63. My writing, like everything I do, comes profoundly from my heart. I believe that if you follow your heart you will be successful in one way or another. Old-fashioned as that might sound, the philosophy is true.

Kim Elizabeth

#64. The key to writing successful YA is to keep the adults out of the story as much as possible.

Beverly Cleary

#65. The scholar may be sure that he writes the tougher truth for the calluses on his palms. They give firmness to the sentence. Indeed, the mind never makes a great and successful effort, without a corresponding energy of the body.

Henry David Thoreau

#66. A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.

Bill Johnson

#67. A writing teacher once told me that the most successful movies and books were simple plots about complex characters. You should be able to articulate your concept in a couple of lines.

James Scott Bell

#68. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Mark Twain

#69. A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur - or APE.

Guy Kawasaki

#70. Being a successful student is about more than reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. It's about being a skilled negotiator, a keen observer, and a master planner.

Stefanie Weisman

#71. Some people have a lot of time, but no money--
It's because they don't work hard enough.
Some people have a lot of money, but no time--
It's because they don't work smart enough.
The most successful people have both.

Bob Sharpe

#72. Why do writers write? Why do actors act? Why do painters paint? It doesn't pay much, unless you're very successful. It's who we are.

Lori Lesko

#73. In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author.

John Locke

#74. Sheer egoism ... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

George Orwell

#75. I started writing lyrics out of desperation. I was broke and wondering where my next job, my next meal was coming from, although I had had several successful revue songs on Broadway.

Sheldon Harnick

#76. I suppose one has to be desperate, to be a successful writer. One has to reach a rock-bottom at which one can afford to let everything go hang. One has got to damn the public, chance one's living, say what one thinks, and be oneself. Then something may come out.

T.H. White

#77. Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial ... a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.

James Kisner

#78. But I wouldn't recommend writing. You can be a successful writer and never meet another soul. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

J.G. Ballard

#79. I don't enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it's successful.

Rod Serling

#80. Find a business mentor. Connect with others who are successful in other lines of business. Bounce ideas off them, pick their brains. Maybe they can re-write a proposal for you.

Cory Trepanier

#81. Writing is like that. You have to have some basic creative spark, and then, if you have that, I feel like you can learn the production side of it. You can learn how to be a good producer. And I guess it does take a certain balance of those two skills in your head to be a successful showrunner.

Ronald D. Moore

#82. Writing offers fairly large rewards to a few successful people, but the rewards come late, and most writers are failures.

Malcolm Cowley

#83. This is a stamina game, so don't despair if you run down a blind alley and have to start over, or if you get another rejection letter. Every successful writer has gone through that, but they kept writing and didn't quit until they made it happen.

Tim Maleeny

#84. You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't stick in your little comfort zone.

Paul Weller

#85. 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

#86. I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

Richard Flanagan

#87. You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

Michael Chabon

#88. To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!

Lillian Cauldwell

#89. Books that take us to an exotic place and never let the grit of that place get under our fingernails...are far less successful. One leaves the places of the book and never feels like one's really gotten one's imaginative passport stamped.

Andrew Lazo