Quotations on Writing
“Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.” ~ Elise Wiesel
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face…You must do the thing you cannot do."~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~ (not exactly a writing quote, but appropriate just the same.)
“You are a writer. Right now. With only what you have in your head as it is. You don't need anything else. You are a writer. You just need to keep writing. Don't let the Writing Fairy tell you that you aren't. That you need something more, that you're pretending to be something you're not. Hemmingway wasn't Hemmingway when he started. He was just a guy named Ernest who sat down at his typewriter.” ~ Joseph Devon
"Forget 'write what you know.' Whether it's something you know or not, the very next book you need to write is the book that you have been longing to read for years, but have not read because it does not yet exist. Write that book. Make it your mission to fill that hole in the body of literature. Write what you love." ~ Tom Morrisey
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~ E.L. Doctorow
"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life." ~Lawrence Kasdan, screenwriter, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." ~ Lord Byron
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." ~ Thomas Mann
“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.” ~ Flannery O'Connor
"If you have the God-given desire to write, then make the decision now that you'll write – strongly, passionately, with a commitment to your craft – and leave the results to Him. He will see to it that your words reach the hearts that need to hear it, whether the few or the many. There is no wasted effort in His economy." ~ James Scott Bell
“Dreamers make excuses for not being writers. People who become writers have to defy the handy alibis available in every person’s life. If you are a writer and this is God’s time for you to produce, there is no such thing as an excuse that will keep you from your typewriter. Only you and/or God can shoulder the responsibility for your failure to write.” ~ Ethel Herr, from An Introduction to Christian Writing
"If you have a story, then tell it. I always believe it's not just about us. It's about the fact that someone in the world needs to hear what we have to say, and we are letting them down if we don't write it." ~ from No Plot, No Problem
“You have a story—a very important story, a story that rests at the core of your being—to tell. It is a story that has torn your heart into pieces, and it is a story of beauty because your heart couldn’t have been torn without your having first loved and somehow lost something that you loved.” ~ Susan Zimmermann, Writing to Heal the Soul
“Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act–truth is always subversive.” ~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.” ~ Bonnie Friedman
"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." ~ Mark Twain
"If I had more time, I would write a shorter story." ~ Mark Twain
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." ~ Samuel Johnson
"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"I can't write five words but that I can change seven." ~ Dorothy Parker
"To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over." ~ John Hersey
"Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned." ~ Oscar Wilde
"Books aren't written—they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." ~Michael Crichton
"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela
"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease." ~ Charles Caleb Colton
"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness." ~ Julia Ward Howe
"Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill." ~ Edmund Morrison
"Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." ~ George Orwell
"All that matters is that, going over and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one’s story, one improves now this sentence, now that..." ~ John Gardner
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." ~ Jack London
"What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn't matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it's thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on." ~ C.S. Lewis,Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
"Write the story that’s stirring inside you, burning in your gut, nagging at you until you’re about to explode. And write that story with as much honesty and vulnerability as you can. Think about the authors you love to read. What makes their writing stand out from the rest? ... Who we are, what stirs our hearts, needs to come out in our writing. We each have stories God’s give us to tell. We need to do that as ourselves, not as an imitation of some other writer. Don’t worry about sounding as good as someone else. Sound as much like you as you can. I have people tell me all the time they can 'hear' me in my books. Whatever you do, make sure your heart is heard." ~ Karen Ball
"All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order." ~Emma Darcy
"The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." ~ John Steinbeck
"The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet." ~ Mary Higgins Clark
"It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." ~ Shirley Hazzard
"There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and just open a vein." ~ Red Smith
"I don't like to write, but I love to have written." ~ Michael Kanin
"Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer." ~ Harlan Ellison
"You can't sit around thinking. You have to sit around writing." ~ David Long
"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... the wait is simply too long." ~ Leonard S. Bernstein
"If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter." ~ Anonymous
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." ~ Robert Frost
"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint . . . and that voice will be silenced." ~ Vincent Van Gogh
"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." ~ Claude M. Bristol
"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'" ~ Mary Anne Rademacher-Hershey
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium." ~ John Steinbeck
"You fail only if you stop writing." ~ Ray Bradbury
"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room." ~ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
"Writing a book is like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don’t have to scourge yourself with a cat-o’-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That’s the same way you go to your desk." ~ Annie Dillard, To Fashion a Text, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
“Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.” ~ Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
“You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working, steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.” ~ Anton Chekhov
“It must be five times harder to become a proficient writer as to become a proficient doctor, mainly becaue there is no true and tried education process for a writer, so every fellow who wants to write for profit, including my daughter Nora, must be prepared for a long, slow, and often very discouraging preparation. But if he’s got it in him to be a writer, this won’t stop him. If he stops, it’s a fair sign that he was never intended to be a writer in the first place.” ~ Nunnally Johnson
“Every day you are afraid. Every day you move through fear to your desk, and as soon as you pick up your pen, or read the sentence left over from the night before, incomplete, needing an adjustment in rhythm—a stronger verb, a slash of color or the taste of bitter herbs—in that moment of solving the problems all fear dissolves. You are writing again.” ~ Sophy Burnham
From the movie Shadows in the Sun ~
"You're not afraid of writing. You're afraid of failing. We all fail. The courage is in the trying."
"I write because I can't imagine doing anything else."
"God has placed in our hearts very particular stories that we alone can tell. Our labor of love is to sit down at our computers, take a deep breath, and write." ~ Liz Curtis Higgs
“There is never a moment when I am not involved in thinking about writing. I can't put it out of my mind entirely, even in the most trying of circumstances. You might as well as me to stop breathing; thinking about my writing is as much a function of my life.” ~ Terry Brooks, Sometimes the Magic Works
“When we share the art that’s in our hearts, our soul sings.” ~ Lisa Guerin, artist, teacher
“My art is such a big part of who I am. I may not know where this creative journey is going to take me, but each day I find my spirit is nourished.” ~ Ruth Rae, jewelry & fiber artist
“Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.” ~ Elise Wiesel
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face…You must do the thing you cannot do."~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~ (not exactly a writing quote, but appropriate just the same.)
“You are a writer. Right now. With only what you have in your head as it is. You don't need anything else. You are a writer. You just need to keep writing. Don't let the Writing Fairy tell you that you aren't. That you need something more, that you're pretending to be something you're not. Hemmingway wasn't Hemmingway when he started. He was just a guy named Ernest who sat down at his typewriter.” ~ Joseph Devon
"Forget 'write what you know.' Whether it's something you know or not, the very next book you need to write is the book that you have been longing to read for years, but have not read because it does not yet exist. Write that book. Make it your mission to fill that hole in the body of literature. Write what you love." ~ Tom Morrisey
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~ E.L. Doctorow
"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life." ~Lawrence Kasdan, screenwriter, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." ~ Lord Byron
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." ~ Thomas Mann
“When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.” ~ Flannery O'Connor
"If you have the God-given desire to write, then make the decision now that you'll write – strongly, passionately, with a commitment to your craft – and leave the results to Him. He will see to it that your words reach the hearts that need to hear it, whether the few or the many. There is no wasted effort in His economy." ~ James Scott Bell
“Dreamers make excuses for not being writers. People who become writers have to defy the handy alibis available in every person’s life. If you are a writer and this is God’s time for you to produce, there is no such thing as an excuse that will keep you from your typewriter. Only you and/or God can shoulder the responsibility for your failure to write.” ~ Ethel Herr, from An Introduction to Christian Writing
"If you have a story, then tell it. I always believe it's not just about us. It's about the fact that someone in the world needs to hear what we have to say, and we are letting them down if we don't write it." ~ from No Plot, No Problem
“You have a story—a very important story, a story that rests at the core of your being—to tell. It is a story that has torn your heart into pieces, and it is a story of beauty because your heart couldn’t have been torn without your having first loved and somehow lost something that you loved.” ~ Susan Zimmermann, Writing to Heal the Soul
“Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act–truth is always subversive.” ~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
“Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their work, despite the difficulties.” ~ Bonnie Friedman
"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." ~ Mark Twain
"If I had more time, I would write a shorter story." ~ Mark Twain
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure." ~ Samuel Johnson
"A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"I can't write five words but that I can change seven." ~ Dorothy Parker
"To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over." ~ John Hersey
"Books are never finished, they are merely abandoned." ~ Oscar Wilde
"Books aren't written—they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." ~Michael Crichton
"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." ~ Enrique Jardiel Poncela
"Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease." ~ Charles Caleb Colton
"The strokes of the pen need deliberation as much as the sword needs swiftness." ~ Julia Ward Howe
"Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill." ~ Edmund Morrison
"Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." ~ George Orwell
"All that matters is that, going over and over the sketch as if one had all eternity for finishing one’s story, one improves now this sentence, now that..." ~ John Gardner
"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." ~ Jack London
"What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn't matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it's thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on." ~ C.S. Lewis,Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves
"Write the story that’s stirring inside you, burning in your gut, nagging at you until you’re about to explode. And write that story with as much honesty and vulnerability as you can. Think about the authors you love to read. What makes their writing stand out from the rest? ... Who we are, what stirs our hearts, needs to come out in our writing. We each have stories God’s give us to tell. We need to do that as ourselves, not as an imitation of some other writer. Don’t worry about sounding as good as someone else. Sound as much like you as you can. I have people tell me all the time they can 'hear' me in my books. Whatever you do, make sure your heart is heard." ~ Karen Ball
"All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order." ~Emma Darcy
"The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business." ~ John Steinbeck
"The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet." ~ Mary Higgins Clark
"It's nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." ~ Shirley Hazzard
"There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and just open a vein." ~ Red Smith
"I don't like to write, but I love to have written." ~ Michael Kanin
"Anyone can become a writer. The trick is staying a writer." ~ Harlan Ellison
"You can't sit around thinking. You have to sit around writing." ~ David Long
"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time ... the wait is simply too long." ~ Leonard S. Bernstein
"If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter." ~ Anonymous
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader." ~ Robert Frost
"If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint . . . and that voice will be silenced." ~ Vincent Van Gogh
"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." ~ Claude M. Bristol
"Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, 'I will try again tomorrow.'" ~ Mary Anne Rademacher-Hershey
"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium." ~ John Steinbeck
"You fail only if you stop writing." ~ Ray Bradbury
"A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room." ~ Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
"Writing a book is like rearing children—willpower has very little to do with it. If you have a little baby crying in the middle of the night, and if you depend only on willpower to get you out of bed to feed the baby, the baby will starve. You do it out of love. Willpower is a weak idea; love is strong. You don’t have to scourge yourself with a cat-o’-nine tails to go to the baby. You go to the baby out of love for that particular baby. That’s the same way you go to your desk." ~ Annie Dillard, To Fashion a Text, Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
“Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.” ~ Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
“You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working, steadily day by day, quite steadily, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.” ~ Anton Chekhov
“It must be five times harder to become a proficient writer as to become a proficient doctor, mainly becaue there is no true and tried education process for a writer, so every fellow who wants to write for profit, including my daughter Nora, must be prepared for a long, slow, and often very discouraging preparation. But if he’s got it in him to be a writer, this won’t stop him. If he stops, it’s a fair sign that he was never intended to be a writer in the first place.” ~ Nunnally Johnson
“Every day you are afraid. Every day you move through fear to your desk, and as soon as you pick up your pen, or read the sentence left over from the night before, incomplete, needing an adjustment in rhythm—a stronger verb, a slash of color or the taste of bitter herbs—in that moment of solving the problems all fear dissolves. You are writing again.” ~ Sophy Burnham
From the movie Shadows in the Sun ~
"You're not afraid of writing. You're afraid of failing. We all fail. The courage is in the trying."
"I write because I can't imagine doing anything else."
"God has placed in our hearts very particular stories that we alone can tell. Our labor of love is to sit down at our computers, take a deep breath, and write." ~ Liz Curtis Higgs
“There is never a moment when I am not involved in thinking about writing. I can't put it out of my mind entirely, even in the most trying of circumstances. You might as well as me to stop breathing; thinking about my writing is as much a function of my life.” ~ Terry Brooks, Sometimes the Magic Works
“When we share the art that’s in our hearts, our soul sings.” ~ Lisa Guerin, artist, teacher
“My art is such a big part of who I am. I may not know where this creative journey is going to take me, but each day I find my spirit is nourished.” ~ Ruth Rae, jewelry & fiber artist