Quotes for writers

You have no right to assume that you’ll be able to write today because you could write yesterday.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

Poets don’t have an ‘audience’: they’re talking to a single person all the time.

Don’t resist the urge to burn down the stronghold, kill off the main love interest or otherwise foul up the lives of your characters.

You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.

Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Creativity lives in paradox: serious art is born from serious play.

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

There are always two people working on a poem, the writer and the reader.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Parents should leave books lying around marked “forbidden” if they want their children to read.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves.

To be an artist is to recognize the particular. To appreciate the peculiar.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

I write with the blood that goes to the ends of my fingers, and it is a very sensuous act.

To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong.

The words that enlighten the soul are more precious than jewels.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

Work begets work. Small actions lead us to the larger movements in our creative lives. Take one small daily action instead of indulging in the big questions.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Character is plot, plot is character.

Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

The answers to a lot of aspiring writers’ problems are as close as the bookshelf. Use it.

I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them — without a thought about publication — and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.

I prefer to be on the side of losers, the misunderstood or lonely people rather than writing about the strong and powerful.

There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written — it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and, if you fail to find that form, the story will not tell itself.

Create whatever causes a revolution in your heart.

Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Male writers are thought of as "writers" first and then "men". As for female writers, they are first "female" and only then "writers".

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

Creation is everything you do. Make something

Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.

You shouldn’t get disillusioned when you get knocked back. All you’ve discovered it that the search is difficult, and you still have a duty to keep on searching.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful – not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else.

Judging your early artistic efforts is artist abuse.

I write it and take my chances.

Reinvent yourself over and over and over and over and over until you find home. There is no timeline for the soul.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on until I am.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.

The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.

Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information. It's an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough – that we should try again. The creative process is a process of surrender, not control. Growth is an erratic forward movement: two steps forward, one step back.

Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.

If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

Looking back I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

Always stop while you are going good and don’t worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry bout it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.

Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

You may not write well every day, but you can always eat a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

A list of authors who have made themselves most beloved and, therefore most comfortable financially, shows that it is our national joy to mistake for the first-rate, the fecund rate.

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Be willing to write really badly.

You fail only if you stop writing.

As a creative being, you will be more productive when coaxed than when bullied.

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

You know, we don't need to be original or inventive. You don't need to find new things. Just take the old things you find about you, the things people have known all their lives, and say them with your style.

If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.