Top 100 Writing Process Creative Process Quotes
#1. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.
Stephen King
#2. By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
#3. [O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#4. fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.
Chris Baty
#7. Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.
Gloria D. Gonsalves
#8. To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what.
Chris Cornell
#9. My background was producing and writing and performing in television when I started out, and I really missed that, that whole creative process that comes from sort of 'me' storytelling.
Eric Bana
#10. A good edit process turns rocks into diamonds, and every author should love that part as much as the creative phase. I do love it. It's a different side to writing. It's like the fine-tuning.
Kim Smith
#11. I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Henning Mankell
#12. Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.
Jessie Burton
#13. Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.
Red Haircrow
#14. Use the creative process - singing, writing, art, dance, whatever - to get to know yourself better.
Catie Curtis
#15. [A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
#16. poetry. i am not writing it.
(make way for me please)
it is my skin. dripping with light.
Sanober Khan
#17. The irritating question they ask us
us being writers
is: "Where do you get your ideas?"
And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!
Neil Gaiman
#18. A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity.
Simon Pegg
#19. I mostly write short stories. They are best written in a continuous creative process. You have a feel of immediacy.
Ruskin Bond
#20. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.
Truman Capote
#21. Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea.
Amy Poehler
#23. The brain is like a muscle; books are the diet and writing is the workout.
Stewart Stafford
#24. Because of my poor writing posture, I started walking in the forest every day, and I found it a potent place to be creatively. It changed me in that it was a new way of doing my creative process, and I realised how much I liked being among tall trees.
Morris Gleitzman
#25. There is a ruthlessness to the creative act. It often involves a betrayal of the status quo.
Alan Watt
#26. Writers think with their soul and draft from their heart
Lisa Fantino
#27. The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Colette
#28. A hammer made of deadlines is the surest tool for crushing writer's block.
Ryan Lilly
#29. When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down.
Stephen King
#30. Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Ray Bradbury
#31. Writing creatively is a process of self-consumption that requires one to dive deeply inside of oneself with no guarantee of reemergence.
Ashim Shanker
#32. My creative process involves reading books and magazines, writing outside, and moving around a lot. I like to pace around when I'm writing songs.
Judith Hill
#33. Tortured Soul 101: The depth of despair one experiences during the creative process (as experienced say, in an abysmally blank page or canvas) is directly proportional to the scope and power of the work that emerges when it breaks.
F.T. McKinstry
#34. Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way.
[Interview, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2009]
Cormac McCarthy
#35. MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor - but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.
John Rember
#37. Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
(Casual Chance, 1964)
Colette
#38. There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.
Agatha Christie
#39. Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.
[A Conversation with Alice Munro, BookBrowse, 1998]
Alice Munro
#40. People talk about books that write themselves, and it's a lie. Books don't write themselves. It takes thought and research and backache and notes and more time and more work than you'd believe.
Neil Gaiman
#41. I could write about how I feel when I sing, write and create something from heartbreak, sorrow, sadness or just simply nothingness. How nothingness can become the most beautiful, unexplainable feeling that makes you forget about gravity for an hour.
Charlotte Eriksson
#42. Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.
[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]
John Green
#43. I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.
Alan Moore
#44. The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
Katherine Mansfield
#45. Writing is wretched, discouraging, physically unhealthy, infinitely frustrating work. And when it all comes together it's utterly glorious.
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) Pep Talk
Ralph Peters
#46. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.
Robert McKee
#47. For those who can do it and who keep their nerve, writing for a living still beats most real, grown-up jobs hands down.
Terence Blacker
#48. My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
Elmore Leonard
#49. When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
John Steinbeck
#50. The artistic methods of poetry, painting, photography, and writing share certain commonalities of deep composition: spirit, rhythm, thought, and scenery.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#51. To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.
DiAnn Mills
#52. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.
Robert M. Pirsig
#53. Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.
Don Roff
#54. I have to be involved. Whether it's me writing by myself or with other people, I definitely want to have my hand in the creative process. That's part of why I got into music in the first place.
David Cook
#55. Learning how to endure your disappointment and frustration is part of the job o fa creative person ... Frustration is not an interruption of your process; frustration is the process.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#56. I think the hardest thing about writing is writing.
[Interview clip in the In Memoriam section of the 85th Academy Awards ceremony, Feb. 24, 2013]
Nora Ephron
#57. I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.
[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]
Cormac McCarthy
#58. 10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer
Write.
Write more.
Write even more.
Write even more than that.
Write when you don't want to.
Write when you do.
Write when you have something to say.
Write when you don't.
Write every day.
Keep writing.
Brian Clark
#59. Entire universes flourish in my mind. Sometimes I get lost in there.
Janey Colbourne
#60. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.
Flannery O'Connor
#61. When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.
Carla H. Krueger
#62. Composing is a natural fit. As far as the creative process goes, I'd rather do this than anything else, by far. Something different happened to me when I started to write music to images. It was a feeling of excitement and connection and a sense of being in the right place that I never had before.
James Newton Howard
#63. Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (The Guardian, 20 February 2010)]
Helen Dunmore
#64. My imagination was running amok again. Twice in one night. This never happens when I'm sitting in front of a typewriter.
Gary Reilly
#65. Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn to express that experience in words.
P.D. James
#66. The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.
Julia Cameron
#67. 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
#68. First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
Octavia E. Butler
#69. Writing music is really personal, and it's a really exciting thing to participate in because represents the full creative process: It feels like something is coming from nothing.
Zooey Deschanel
#70. I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art on the road that may indeed end in extinction.
Stephen King
#71. Musicians have notes. Painters have paint. Writers have words.
Lisa Fantino
#72. Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
Brian Raif
#73. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.
Madeleine L'Engle
#74. Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.
Stephen L. Carter
#75. Forget ideas, Mr. Author.
What kind of pen do you use?
Stephen Fry
#76. This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
#77. I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see.
Cecelia Ahern
#78. All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.
Erica Jong
#79. When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
Roger Ebert
#80. Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard.
(Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, Humanities, July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
David McCullough
#81. It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.
Sanober Khan
#82. The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
[Keynote Address, University of the Arts, 134th Commencement (Philadelphia, PA, May 17, 2012)]
Neil Gaiman
#83. Your experiences are the foundation for your story; your imagination takes it from there.
J.R. Young
#84. There is no such thing as an 'unemployed writer', only an unemployed mind
Kevin Cowdall
#85. You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty - done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.
Chila Woychik
#87. When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.
Joanna Penn
#88. The sooner you finish procrastinating, the sooner you can get back to your art.
Stephanie Lennox
#89. I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.
Tess Gerritsen
#90. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#91. i write
because
it is
the only way
i can
reach you.
Sanober Khan
#92. Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)
Anton Chekhov
#93. The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born - without the luxury of time.
Julia Cameron
#95. Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a "life-is-like-this" on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.
Chila Woychik
#96. It's neither and it's both. That's the perfect kind of art. Labels only detract from the artist's intention.
Ted Dekker
#98. Why do you want to become an author? I will accept only one answer. If it is because you feel you can write better than you can do anything else then go ahead and do it without frills and flourishes. Stick to your present job and write in your spare time: but do it as if it is a whole time job.
Ngaio Marsh
#99. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he'll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
[1967 interview]
Ray Bradbury
#100. The more genuinely creative [the writer] is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself
Dorothy L. Sayers
