Top Writing Advice Quotes

Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

If certain aspect needs to be inconsistent, it must better be consistently inconsistent throughout the story.

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

Work on your craft, whatever your medium. Determination is your illusion headway toward reality.

Biographies are best when written chronologically. Boring people don't make for good biographies.

It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be.

Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

Language is a tool for communicating and not a barrier to writing

Life is a book. There are many pages to be written.

Write at the edges of the day.

I know, not everyone will like what I write, but writing is not about trying to please everybody.

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our fa...

If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.

If someone wanted to be a runner, you don't tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.

Writing is not a hobby. It's the only way I get to shut up the demons in my head.

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise...