Writing Quotes

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

There is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production.

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.

Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden....

Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I’ll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name, perhaps because I’m a regular. Anyways got my shit, left…barely covering the tax. Took the long way home; to get away from that haunting typewriter. Sat down at some park bench, as I started to open my poison; A memory rushed into me. A empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the Christmas tree. I thought my dad would want another drink, so started to pour my bottle into the dirt & cried.

It’s not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it’s much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.

When your heart starts to feel full again. I love FREE refills, and if a restaurant tries to double charge me, I refuse to write a love poem on their Yelp page.-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz

Q: Best part about being a musical theatre book writer?A: Explaining what that is.

It is the sweat of the servants that make their squire look smart.

When you write something down, it stays forever.It's like a little part of you that you're giving to the universe

Had Mary Shelley fretted so? Maybe yes, maybe no. She’d begun her classic work on a dare. Had culled a dream to bring it into being. But it was not lost on Laura that the story might be a prolonged exercise in Shelley’s personal terrors. The subtitle of the work was 'Prometheus Unbound,' and Laura wondered if Shelley herself was not Prometheus in the form of the wandering monster, who desperately sought love and acceptance but was ultimately driven to face an icy landscape that seemed almost fantastical—the way our own subconscious could be, white and frozen-slippery.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

When you left you left behind a fieldof silent flowers under a sky full of unstirred clouds...you left a million butterfliesmid-silky flutters You left like midnight rain against my dreaming ears Oh and how you left leaving my coffee scentless and my couch comfortless leaving upon my fingers the melting snow of you you left behind a calendar full of empty days and seasons full of aimless wanders leaving me alone with an armful of sunsets your reflection behind in every puddle your whispersupon every curtain your fragranceinside every petal you left your echoes in between the silence of my eyes Oh and how you leftleaving my sands footless and my shores songless leaving me with windows full of moistened moonlight nights and nightsof only a half-warmed soul and when you left... you left behind a lifetime of moments untouched the light of a million starsunshed and when you left you somehowleft my poem...unfinished. (Published in Taj Mahal Review Vol.11Number 1 June 2012)

I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

Even so have I given the womb of the earth to those that be sown in it in their times.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app, the thing most impervious to threat by everything that’s not the word.

Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts... for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and the season of summer is alive in spicy bloom, and beautiful women fill the room, and are generous with laughter and smiles... these things fill men's hearts with joy and remind one that life’s bounty is not always fleeting but can be captured, and enjoyed. It is in writing about this scene that I relive this night in my soul.

Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit.These are the things all the great philosophersjust won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathingAnd you keep writing-creating because that’s what you doAnd that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guideYou except your own. Make it count.~ R.M. ENGELHARDT

sometimes i am not sure.if i am writing the poemor the poemis writing me.

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

As Gabe continued to speak, he sounded to be a cheerful and intelligent person, two attributes I have commonly found associated with people who spend most of their time outdoors.-from New River, in the anthology AWAKE IN THE WORLD

To be a poet in today’s technological age means to be underrated and at times, ignored. In a world where the noise of industry reigns supreme, the poet’s voice is being drowned out, but it is a voice that is desperately needed. Our words ring out into the atmosphere and calls the masses back to their senses. We must seize this opportunity and remain true to our purpose in society. Ours is a most noble duty, here to represent the misunderstood and underrepresented, and one day, one person will heed the call of our words and the world will be set ablaze!

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

Still not sure about how easily he could be integrated into their posse, Trevor smiled in delighted relief at how tolerantly two of his close friends had received his new identity.

The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race

Everything in life is a metaphor for everything in life." Bonnie Marlewski-Probert

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

Maybe what this is. What we have, is something that will save us from ourselves.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.

I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don't follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character's unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.

Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own

Memoirs: the backstairs of history.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

When I have fully executed this phase of my life, then I can begin a new chapter.

Writers write while dreamers procastinate.

I don’t need to write. Madness or suicide are other options, though not nearly as compelling. But I want to create; I hope to create worlds in my own image, admittedly a self-centered plan. I want others to understand me better, pay more attention to me, like or love me for who I am. Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I should simply learn to say, “Let’s have lunch.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Turning a manuscript into a book is easy getting the manuscript ready to become a book is hard.

How do you paint a writer's block?Just fill it with fifty shades of black.

Writing fiction feels like an adventurous act, nudging aside reality a word at a time.

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know it is not. This helps you take the job seriously and do your best on everything you write.

You drive, walk, eat, look at television, read, and all the while, beyond you and the cozy circle created by your lady around herself and you, like the natural emanations of stars, other lives circle yours, seeds still winged and wind-borne, looking for sympathetic soil. You feel the juices and solids of your body in attempted rearrangement, or, more disturbing, making an effort to create a stillness that approximates death, beyond which the body does become soil, receptive to all wind-borne seeds. In a not especially prolonged stillness, as though no chances could be taken that you might decide to become perpetual motion, words fall out of the air, a random fall from which you might be tempted to make selection, and as you do not move, cannot, a string of words falls onto you, and from you, onto the paper: winter rye greening up, smoothing the old brown earth with a fine new plane: Carpenter Rye, neighbor.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

Less is more.

after life has broken you open, perhaps you may create art

There are exactly as many special occasions in life as we choose to celebrate.

The real education never ends. It is a cycle of reading, thinking and writing.

Lost in a book is a great place to be found.

Written words, if carefully laid down, represent the civilized ideal of reason.

Writing is painting for the imagination!

All great stories began as shitty first drafts.There are no exceptions to this.

I have always been a huge admirer of my own work. I'm one of the funniest and most entertaining writers I know.

I think the responsibility of writers is to convey the feelings that exist in the moment, the moment of that sharp and immediate pang of sour smiles when your heart suddenly starts pumping ice through your veins and becomes difficult and visual perception takes on the appearance of cinematographer on Cops, with unsteady frames and jostling scenes, running through a backyard chasing perpetrators.