Top Writing Process Quotes

Writing is like daydreaming through your fingers.

My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.

we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose...

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a b...

I write the sacred words from wondering.

Writing as a creative art flourishes only when there are no rules. Rules stifle you from entering the silent and forbidden spaces where the core of the story is waiting to be revealed.

I make up as little as possible. I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of t...

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Writing is like painting a painting. Layer over layer over layer.

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth...

By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.

So they spread the paintings on the lawn, and the boy explained each of them. This is the school, and this is the playground, and these are my friends. He stared at the paintings for a long time and t...

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, andwriting some more can help you contr...

(Dorothy) Dunnett is the master of the invisible, particularly in her later books. Where is this tension coming from? Why is this scene so agonizing? Why is this scene so emotional? Tension and emotio...

I believe that fiction with its untrammelled nature, speaks to no one, and by so doing, speaks to all.

Writings are thoughts in a defined moment.