Top Writing Life Quotes

One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; gi...

How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".

What doesn't kill us gives us something new to write about.

Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.

Behind every novel is a greater story of how it came to be published.

I only wish to write.

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

She cured me of my sadness.

Anecdotes don't make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.

Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages.

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal of external life otherwise than as you see i...

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in w...

Writing is the act of discovery.

I have spent a good many years sincetoo many, I thinkbeing ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line...

You can write great books, the great man continued. Or you can have kids. It's up to you.[...]Writing was a practice. The more you wrote, the better a writer you became, and the more books you produce...

Writers, by nature, are going to be slightly more delusional than others because we're dreamers, we imagine the unlikely, that's how we create... Rather than hoping my delusion becomes a reality, I'd...

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he...