Top 100 The Writing Life Quotes
#1. But the writing life, it turned out, was difficult. It wasn't like you could sit down and flip a switch and crank on the ventilation system. Sometimes it didn't work, and sometimes you couldn't even find the switch.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
#2. Many aspects of the writing life have changed since I published my first book, in the 1960s. It is more corporate, more driven by profits and marketing, and generally less congenial - but my day is the same: get out of bed, procrastinate, sit down at my desk, try to write something.
Paul Theroux
#3. Persistence is worth at least as much as talent. The writing life is not a series of gentle encouragements. It's more like a series of brutal kicks in the teeth. Those who grow a thick enough skin to persevere, survive. Those who do not, do not.
Gardner Dozois
#4. One of the things that made me try writing novels was I could take time off to be with the kids. That's the practical side of what I love about the writing life.
Simon Toyne
#5. Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
Alice McDermott
#6. But in the meantime I became accustomed to the writing life and it would be hard to change now - partly because of the salary cut if I went to my other love, teaching; and partly because I still have stories to tell, even though it isn't all that fun doing the work anymore.
Orson Scott Card
#7. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
Will Self
#8. Whether you're conducting phone interviews or simply need to hear yourself think, privacy is an extremely important variable in the writing life.
Sage Cohen
#9. The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
Miriam Toews
#10. Fear is the major cargo that American writers must stow away when the writing life calls them into its carefully chosen ranks.
Pat Conroy
#12. I like the writing life, but it's not something that always makes enough money.
Tom Drury
#13. Lehman uses many conveyances - including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes - to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.
Ken Tucker
#14. When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.
Dani Shapiro
#15. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
#16. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#17. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?
Stasia Ward Kehoe
#18. A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
Andre Maurois
#19. Every time I flicked channels, there I was, talking. I was talking too much and writing too little. So Naomi and I went to Hawaii. The phone was cut off and we lost touch. This gave me the chance to have a good think about my life.
Joe Eszterhas
#20. Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
#21. Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They'll never live the way you live. Go do it.
Ray Bradbury
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.
Albert Einstein
#25. I suppose more than anything, it's the way of life in this part of the country that influences my writing. In Eastern North Carolina, with the exception of Wilmington, most people live in small towns.
Nicholas Sparks
#26. Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
Samuel Colbran
#27. 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
#28. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#29. When I as reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.
Deborah Lawrenson
#30. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.
Louisa May Alcott
#31. Writing is a lot like life, the more you learn the more you realize that you don't have a clue
Carl Henegan
#32. Like everyone else in this world, I have had struggles. There's disappointment and obstacles in everybody's life. I feel like I was writing 'Second Chance' not just for myself, but also for the people who have struggled.
El DeBarge
#33. We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.
Annie Dillard
#36. It is in writing of the emotions that style becomes most individual, in moments of passion, betrayal, of life and death.
Hallie Burnett
#37. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#38. I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for the 'New Yorker,' I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people.
Jamaica Kincaid
#39. At the outset, I think that one should be natural, not just when it comes to writing but in every area of life. If you try to be something that you are not just to impress others, then it's a rather sad life.
Amish Tripathi
#40. You are lovelier than all the roses in the world.
Avijeet Das
#41. The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.
P.G. Wodehouse
#42. Use original detail in your writing. Life is so rich, if you can write down the real details of the way things were and are, you hardly need anything else.
Natalie Goldberg
#43. Because of the wonderfully positive response to 'Life's That Way,' I am considering writing some more autobiographical stuff - maybe another book. I don't know. It doesn't help that I'm lazy.
Jim Beaver
#44. It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.
Truman Capote
#45. Life is like a friendship, eventually it will end, by conflict or God's hand"
-Sons In The Clouds
Randy Mitchell
#46. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#47. It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
#48. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#49. A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
David Foster Wallace
#50. I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.
Sylvia Plath
#51. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#53. Unlike motor sport, I didn't get into music for the live performances. I like writing and studio work and seeing how a song can come to life.
Jacques Villeneuve
#54. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
Ann Patchett
#55. In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life.
Kelis
#56. Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.
Stanley Kubrick
#57. You and you alone are the only person that can live the life that writes the story that you were meant to tell. And the world needs your story because the world needs your voice.
Kerry Washington
#59. There is nothing like been consumed by the blazing fire of untold story.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#60. Love and ruin are explained with letters of the alphabet.
The power of the word can describe the glory of the universe. It only requires an open mind and heart.
J.R. Ortiz
#61. 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
#62. Take a great adventure to a place, learn the rich history and make your own observation about the place.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#63. These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.
Virginia Woolf
#65. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#67. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.
Nadege Richards
#68. Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
Stella Atrium
#69. I kept writing all these ballads; they're me speaking about life. But how am I gonna do the live show I wanna do if I don't have something I can dance to?
Laura Bell Bundy
#70. I don't sit down with a goal of writing. I read books or magazines. I watch TV. I go to the doctor. I get on airplanes. I live a normal life and sometimes I'll notice something or read things or experience things.
Brian Regan
#72. Writing is the most cathartic experience of my life.
April Wood
#73. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
#74. Search your own life for the story only you can tell. The best thing about writing from life is that you can be sure of using original material. And no research is needed beyond the time you spend looking deep inside your own heart.
Elizabeth Held Forsyth
#75. Writing should be testimony to the vast flow of life through us.
Victor Serge
#76. Now write this: 'The greatest rapture of my life was afforded me on a boat in Nassau by Fatima Blush,' and sign it 'James Bond, 007.'
Barbara Carrera
#77. I've always tried to insert consciousness and spirituality in my records, interpreting the writings of all cultures and religions and how they apply to life in modern times.
Rakim
#78. Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
Vijay Seshadri
#79. Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.
Robert Galbraith
#80. There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
August Wilson
#82. And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.
Charles Dickens
#83. The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
Kate Atkinson
#84. I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
Elena Ferrante
#85. Writing is the birth of my closure. Either it splits me open and comes out easy with tears or it pushes me to hysterics. Whichever way, it brings me a new life.
Sandra Proto
#86. Writing is like giving yourself homework, really hard homework, every day, for the rest of your life. You want glamorous? Throw glitter at the computer screen.
Katrina Monroe
#87. The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.
Marcus Aurelius
#88. Don't be afraid to start at the bottom of the ladder. And have the courage to climb to the top.
Rosenthal
#89. You're writing your life as you go - the question becomes, how do you want to write your life?
Hill Harper
#90. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#91. You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.
Jake Kasdan
#92. Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
John Darnielle
#93. The myth of 'You have to be a tortured artist' is a myth," says Lin. "You can have a happy, healthy life and still go to all these crazy dark places in your writing, and then go play with your child and hug your wife.
Jeremy McCarter
#94. Most people assume I write at night because of the kind of books I write, but I can shut out the light with my mind.
Carla H. Krueger
#95. To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant - inexcusably ignorant, in a world where three out of four people have learned to read and write.
Daniel Dennett
#96. Nothing ever really ends. That's the horrible part of being in the short-story business - you have to be a real expert on ends. Nothing in real life ends. 'Millicent at last understands.' Nobody ever understands.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
#97. I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
Rick Riordan
#98. I keep the description basic as it allows you to mould the story around your life.
Airam
#99. Obviously this all gets tricky/complicated when your writing reveals so much of your private/intimate life, and the nature of writing on the Internet comes with a lot of focus on your "personal brand."
Marie Calloway
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