Top Writing Life Quotes

You are a writer when your overwhelming need to tell a story outweighs your fear of ridicule.

To all you writers, artists, musicians, creative types who want to give up: It's okay to walk away for a bit. Get your second wind. But your writing, art, music will be there, lurking over your should...

Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.

Writers are a superior breed. No one else can face so much rejection and still thrive.

To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to...

Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.

Shigure: G'morning.Tohru: Good morning!Yuki: Um, Shigure, it's . Why don't you get a sleep pattern?Shigure: I became an author so I wouldn't have to.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across...

I write what I want to read. If I were to write what I know, I'd be staring at a blank page forever.

You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by expedient of the printed word. You have the power of the pen over your enemies.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Beware of being only a writer.

The beauty of writing is imagining new endings to a time of darkness, like burning off a morning fog with the heat and clarity of the sun.

Word count doesn't tell me when a story ends, my characters will tell me.

I've written about 2,000 short stories; I've only published 300 and I feel I'm still learning. Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old fashi...

Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my des...

Perhaps the hardest thing in all literature— at least I have found it so: by no voluntary effort can I accomplish it: I have to take it as it comes— is to write anything original. And perhaps the easi...

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to fo...