Top Writing Life Quotes

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that soo...

Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's j...

If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.

May the words come easy, the doubt be weak, and the coffee strong enough to eat through steel. (I don't drink coffee...but I understand most authors do, and they like it with a bit of fight in it.) No...

Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.

One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.

However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a facto...

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.

I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably woul...

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who ha...

A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.

There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our wor...

There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

I must write now and quickly, before I begin to prefer the perfect version that lives in my head.

Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.

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

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

Sometimes we dream of things that we've always wanted--of things that we have been searching for our whole lives without knowing it...and other times we wake up and know what we have to do. I have to...

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