Quotes About Writing

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy— and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Both Rowling and Meyer, they're speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.

Blogging, writing conventional articles, and being science consultant and pocket protector ninja to various web portals and TV programs, quite often trying to promote the penicillin of hard data to people who had no interest in being cured of their ignorance.

Hmm,' said the King. 'I must write that down in my book of aphorisms. I don't know if it is deep, but it sounds deep.

i hope i sell some books soonest

I will write: for myself, for those who come after, and for the voices that cry out not to be forgotten.

Writing is a form of mischief.

It takes almost as much imagination to justify what you write as it does to write it.

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion.

I figured I could easily live a year on the twelve hundred, and, at first, I thought of France. But there'd be the nuisance of learning frog-talk and the passage there and back. Besides, I wanted to be near a big library. My novel was going to be about the American Revolution, if you can picture it. I'd read "Henry Esmond" over and over and I wanted to write a book like that.