Top 100 Write The Book Quotes
#1. I'm a man with a mission in two or three editions And I'm giving you a longing look Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.
Elvis Costello
#2. In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.
Junot Diaz
#3. Before writing, I start with a series of questions, specific things I need to know before I can write the book ... That list grows and changes as I do more and more research. But when I've answered the bulk of the questions, I begin to write ...
David B. Coe
#4. If you don't write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
A.M. Homes
#5. If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, Wake up and write the book!
Kerry Greenwood
#6. 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
#7. My first book deal was actually for a textbook - 'Judo and You' - that I wrote while teaching at Temple University. A scout for Kendall-Hunt came looking for someone to write the book, and even though it wasn't a course I was teaching there, I agreed to write it.
Jonathan Maberry
#8. I was always taught to write the book you want to read. It's a philosophy I haven't wavered from since.
E.A. De Graaf
#9. Titles are very hard. Sometimes a title comes before I start to write the book, but often I finish the book, and I still don't have a title. I have to go through the book again, and then sometimes I hope a title jumps out at me from what I've written.
Eve Bunting
#10. Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story.
Tom Clancy
#11. I wanted what women always want: permission. But he'd had that before this book was even written; it was, after all, the first thing I'd envied about him. It was arguably what enabled him to write the book in the first place. ("Envy")
Kathryn Chetkovich
#12. Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
Louise Brown
#14. Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.
R.L. Stine
#15. But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer ... well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.
Dean Koontz
#16. You must feel it from within. You must want to write the book. You must desire to write the book
Emily Gowor
#17. Write the book you want to read, the one you cannot find.
Carol Shields
#18. When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.
David McCullough
#19. So this is always the key: you have to write the book you love, the book that's alive in your heart. That's the one you have to write.
Lurlene McDaniel
#20. In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.
Salman Rushdie
#21. The state might say that it had taken a year to write the book, and the author might say it had taken thirty. Goethe said that every bon mot of his had cost a purse of gold. What
Upton Sinclair
#22. Introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard
Barack Obama
#23. When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.
Fran Lebowitz
#24. Write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't.
Maggie Stiefvater
#25. It's funny, I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.
Dan Brown
#26. Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
Hilary Mantel
#27. In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.
Luke Rhinehart
#28. my heart woke me crying last night how can i help i begged my heart said write the book
Rupi Kaur
#29. Write the book the way it should be written, then give it to somebody to put in the commas and shit.
Elmore Leonard
#30. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.
David Guterson
#31. I tended to write the book in these bursts of two or three months at a time. So I would know, or at least feel securely, that for the next few months I was at least going to have a few hours a day.
Chad Harbach
#32. The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#33. A long time ago, I heard a piece of advice that went something like "write the book you wish you could find on the shelf but can't." And that's what I do...
Maggie Stiefvater
#34. When it comes time to write the book itself I'll shut the lights out, picture the scene I'm about to write then close my eyes and go at it. Yes, I can touch type.
Jeffery Deaver
#35. If I am spared," he always said to Constance, "I will write the book myself. If not, see that my notes are entrusted to some worthy cynic who will not be too concerned with the truth.
Shirley Jackson
#36. As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
David Bergen
#37. When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.
E.L. Doctorow
#38. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.
Ann Patchett
#39. Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.
Samuel West
#40. I didn't write the book to sell the book, but to tell my experiences.
Larry Hagman
#42. I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane.
Jonathan Lethem
#43. I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.
Carlos Fuentes
#44. Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.
Colson Whitehead
#45. If you don't write the book, the book ain't gonna get written.
Tom Clancy
#46. Write the book you want to read
Anne Rice
#47. Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.
Maggie Stiefvater
#48. I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.
Bret Easton Ellis
#49. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
Madeleine L'Engle
#50. Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.
Yann Martel
#51. The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed
Helene Cixous
#52. I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.
Ruth Rendell
#53. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO
Salman Rushdie
#54. I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
Neil Gaiman
#55. I tried writing this book about a singer in a wedding band, but realized I only wanted to write the book so I could have an excuse to sing with a wedding band as research. That's not a good enough reason to write a book.
Megan McCafferty
#56. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
Andrea Seigel
#57. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.
G.K. Chesterton
#58. 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
#59. Someday, when he was good enough, he would ask her to write them in a book and let him do all the pictures.
Katherine Paterson
#60. 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
#61. Duty. Honor. He yearns to write his name large across the book of history, to get away from his wife, or both. Perhaps he just wants to be warm for once in his life.
George R R Martin
#62. That was par for the course but I also found that commissions were being canceled and in fact I considered this directly libelous - I write biographies for a living as well as being a journalist - for a non fiction book to be called fiction from beginning to end.
Anthony Holden
#63. Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#64. Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.
Michael Dirda
#65. 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
#66. If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.
Benjamin Franklin
#67. I've always wanted to write comic books, my earliest memories are of waiting for Dad to come home from work, and, secreted in his lawyer's leather briefcase, would be comics from the store.
Arvind Ethan David
#68. Sometimes writing about a TV show, or a movie, or a book, is the most honest way to write about yourself.
Aaron Burch
#69. The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.
Jodi Picoult
#70. I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.
Salman Rushdie
#71. I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.
Lawrence Wright
#72. Welcome to my world! I've been through it all, and I often pinch myself to believe my luck. I design jewlery, create cosmetics, perform comedy, act, lecture, write books, travel, have a fabulous daughter, and a phenomenal grandson-and I feel I'm the luckiest woman on the planet.
Joan Rivers
#73. I write because the book I want to read has not been written yet.
Richard H.R. Penn
#74. I'm really bad at describing my books. Journalists like to have things like "It's The Terminator Meets the Seven Dwarfs." And I can't do that with my books. If I could, I probably wouldn't write them.
Charles De Lint
#75. Everybody should write a book whether you get it published or not because the experience of sort of taking it all and throwing it down on paper is unbelievably cathartic.
Gary Dell'Abate
#76. Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
Anita Desai
#77. 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
#78. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.
Anne Enright
#79. I actually have, in all seriousness, in the back of my mind someday to write a book, the title of which would be 'Quit Now and Other Practical Advice for the Aspiring Actor.'
Joshua Malina
#80. If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#81. How about I call you when I finish this?"
"But you don't even have my phone number," he said.
"I strongly suspect you write it in the book.
John Green
#82. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#83. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.
Linwood Barclay
#84. I don't like my birthday. I don't like things that are directed towards me. It took me a long time to get over people asking me to write my name in the book.
Matthew Pearl
#85. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.
Daniel Kehlmann
#86. This book is dedicated to the many readers in this and in other countries who write to me asking: 'What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?' My best wishes to you all, and I hope you will enjoy meeting Tommy and Tuppence again, years older, but with spirit unquenched!
Agatha Christie
#87. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.
Miles Davis
#88. The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.
Rachel Gibson
#89. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.
Emma Donoghue
#90. Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
China Mieville
#91. I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
Zelda Fitzgerald
#92. I really strive to bring something new to each book. I don't want to write the same book over and over again.
Robert Crais
#93. I always dread the process of writing because I'm not a writer. I'm an audible guy, I'm a verbal guy. I love to talk. I write a book every couple years, but it just takes everything out of me to get a book out.
T.C. Boyle
#94. At university - when I was supposed to be studying biochemistry - I had tried to write a children's book about a boy and a wolf cub, and there was a paragraph in that which was from the wolf's point of view.
Michelle Paver
#95. 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
#96. Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.
Patti Smith
#97. I believe he's got a lot of courage to write that book. If the Axis had lost the war, we'd be able to say and write anything we wanted, like we used to; we'd be one country and we'd have a fair legal system, the same one for all of us.
Philip K. Dick
#98. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#99. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#100. I hear you don't write any more," he says ...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread.
Richard Russo
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