Top 100 Writing A Book Of Quotes
#1. I've published one book before, and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany, about fitness.
Franka Potente
#2. I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
Molly Ringwald
#3. Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
Jane Yolen
#4. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
Carl Sagan
#5. I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book.
Dave Eggers
#6. 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
#7. I still get enormous pleasure and a sense of fulfillment out of writing a book that I'm proud of. I see myself as a bit like a jewel-maker who can sit back and admire his work.
Wilbur Smith
#8. 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
#9. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.
Neale Donald Walsch
#10. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.
Kingsley Amis
#11. In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
Rose Tremain
#12. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.
Patti Smith
#13. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.
Chila Woychik
#14. The openness of such networked devices reflects our growing desire to construct writing in a way that breaks down the traditional distinctions between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopedia and the library.
Jay David Bolter
#15. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#16. For me, writing for kids is harder because they're a more discriminating audience. While adults might stay with you, if you lose your pacing or if you have pages of extraneous description, a kid's not going to do that. They will drop the book.
Rick Riordan
#17. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
Jonathan Franzen
#18. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#19. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize
Arthur Hertzberg
#20. Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements.
Guy Kawasaki
#21. There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.
Eduardo Galeano
#22. I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!
Robert B. Parker
#23. Pretend you're not spending $3 to read one of my books but buying me a coffee and having a conversation about yourself.
Robin Sacredfire
#24. Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
Ben H. Winters
#25. In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris West
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction ... it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.
Elissa Schappell
#32. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark Twain
#33. Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.
Alice Hoffman
#34. 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
#35. Writing is very good for household tasks. Because you'd rather fix a dripping tap or paint an old wall - you'd rather do almost anything than sit and write. I have to reach a point of obsession in order to write, and so I find starting a book incredibly difficult.
Damon Galgut
#36. My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.
Jami Attenberg
#37. 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
#39. One of my book-reading friends used the term "our story unfolds" when describing a paper he was writing. He became somewhat less of a friend right at that moment.
Tommy Greenwald
#40. At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.
Diane Setterfield
#41. Writing, acting, music, comedy. A deep love of literature and books. Thank God for all the artists who've helped me.
Bill Hicks
#42. 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
#43. I've started working on a new album, I'm writing a new book ... there are a lot of good things on the horizon.
Ace Frehley
#44. Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!
Mary Balogh
#45. I hope never to retire. I write so many because it's the thing I like to do most - to write. And if you write every day, you just naturally get a lot of books.
Eve Bunting
#46. For such a long time, when you're a writer, you really are just writing for yourself, and maybe a few friends. So it's really amazing when your book gets out there and more people are reading and responding to it. It really makes the world of the books feel real.
Cassandra Clare
#47. Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.
David Bezmozgis
#48. During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.
J.K. Rowling
#49. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#50. 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
#51. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.
William Zinsser
#52. I just want to touch something deep in the heart of humanity. I don't know if that's in movies, producing films, or writing a book, but I'm concerned about our spiritual well-being as a human race. I want to impact people in a way that makes us all reach for our best.
Nicole Ari Parker
#53. When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.
Daniel Handler
#54. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.
Amy Poehler
#55. The book of war, the one we've been writing since one ape slapped another, was completely useless in this situation. We had to write a new one from scratch.
Max Brooks
#56. Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.
Rick Yancey
#57. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.
Robert Walser
#58. The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer
Sol Stein
#59. I love to read. I remember hearing that the average author takes two years to write a book. So when I read a book, I feel like I am getting two years of life experiences.
Mark Batterson
#60. The damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.
Winifred Holtby
#61. Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#62. I write both at home and at coffee shops, and I have a terrible work ethic - I have a tendency to write most of my books right before the deadline. I'm trying to work on that, but so far, I'm not getting any more organized.
Elizabeth Hoyt
#63. I want to write some books. Books that have nothing to do with music, just some fiction type of books for a whole different audience of people.
Jhene Aiko
#64. I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.
Iain Banks
#65. Energy is a being yet is not. For it to materialise it must be pure thus it turns into a crystal like form.
That is the true being of the Elders and the Three Immortal Blades.
And your body has been cursed with it.
Max Jacket- The Three Immortal Blades
Kia Carrington-Russell
#66. Brendan O'Meara's Six Weeks in Saratoga is a victory to be savored by those who treasure good writing in general and tales of the track in particular. Horses may win races, but they also win hearts as this impressive book proves beyond doubt. A memorable, sure-footed debut.
Madeleine Blais
#67. I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film.
Don Winslow
#68. When you were born, did your parents shove a book of world history in your face? No, absolutely not. They gave you what you could handle, and that's exactly how you need to treat the reader.
A.J. Flowers
#69. I just noticed I've been writing lots of female-led things. Two of them haven't been announced yet, but the big Greg Capullo book I'm doing is a female-led story, and I'm doing another series with John Romita which is a female-led story as well.
Mark Millar
#70. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#71. What does the absolutely final deadline apply to? What book?"
If there was one book that did not cry out for a sequel, it was "Death of a Doge". "Don't you remember what an awful time you had writing that book?
Martha Grimes
#72. I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak.
Julia Cameron
#73. I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.
Christopher Bollen
#74. I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.
John Steinbeck
#75. Black is the most slimming of all Colors. It is the most flattering. You can wear black at any Time. You can wear it at any age. You can wear it for almost any occasion. I could write a book about black.
Christian Dior
#76. Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.
Aidan Chambers
#77. The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good; and many a good book has remained unwritten ... because there floated before the mind's eye the ideal of a better or a best.
Richard Chenevix Trench
#78. Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.
Kate Christensen
#79. I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.
Roger Zelazny
#80. My favourite all time quote is from Eileen Gray, the subject of my new book The Interview. She believed, 'to create one must first question everything'. A concept that applies to writing as to life
Eileen Gray
#81. There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.
Maxim Gorky
#82. I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.
Imre Kertesz
#83. In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.
Susan Minot
#84. It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.
S.A. Bodeen
#85. It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
Thomas Perry
#86. I long believed that one was born a writer, that it was enough to allow to ripen within oneself for an appropriate number of years this precious seed, and that then one day the first book would appear, as had earlier, at the appointed hour, the first tooth. 53
Marcel Benabou
#87. The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
Karen Joy Fowler
#88. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.
Neil Leckman
#89. When a man wants to write a book full of unassailable facts, he always goes to the British Museum.
Anthony Trollope
#90. Want to be a writer? take a good book a good pen and a notepad to bed with you every night of your life.
Ken Scott
#91. 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
#92. I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves
you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
Ray Bradbury
#93. He who writes distichs, wishes, I suppose, to please by brevity. But, tell me, of what avail is their brevity, when there is a whose book full of them?
Martial
#94. Outside sleep's open window, between the drops of rain, history is writing a recipe book for every earthly pain.
Ani DiFranco
#95. The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.
Aleksandar Hemon
#96. I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me
J.K. Rowling
#97. Well, I definitely have an artistic side to me as well. I write, I act, I draw. With that artistic mind I have, a lot of doors have opened for me. I can try to pursue, like - if it's something using my writing skills, maybe a book. Or maybe if it's my drawing skills, some clothing designs.
Vinny Guadagnino
#98. One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.
Justin Cronin
#99. 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
#100. I don't read a lot of inspirational books for life. But for writing, I think the two best books are The War of Art and William Zinsser's On Writing Well. I read a lot of classics;
Donald Miller
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