Writing Quotes - If a story is in you, it has to come
out
“I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I
didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some
sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re
through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been
served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end
of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was
supposed to do and everything was OK .”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others
say in a whole book.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them
right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
― John Waters
“If a story is in you, it has to come out.”
― William Faulkner
“When you're missing a peice of yourself, aching, gut
wrenching emptiness begins to take over. Until you find the link that completes
your very soul, the feeling will never go away. Most people find a way to fill
this void, material possessions, a string of relationships, affairs, food...I
bare my soul, with words, for all to see.”
― Jennifer Salaiz
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
― Richard Bach
“Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so
they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.”
― Steve Martin
“Poems are never finished - just abandoned”
― Paul Valery
“That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had
better be the right ones.”
― Raymond Carver
“Put down everything that comes into your head and then
you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth,
without pity, and destroy most of it."
(Casual Chance, 1964)”
― Colette
“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a
living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our
readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone
who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who
without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have
hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it
possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which
now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music
they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the
richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil
“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like
there's no such thing as perfect despair.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hear the Wind Sing
“If a writer falls in love with you, you can never
die.”
― Mik Everett
“With writing, we have second chances.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or
short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I
love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to
write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere.
Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!”
― Audre Lorde
“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be
sure it doesn't exist.”
― Charles Baudelaire
“When writing a novel a writer should create living
people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.”
― Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are
undeservedly remembered.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to
read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing
“In old days books were written by men of letters and
read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by
nobody.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not
consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the
first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but
cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
“At night, when the objective world has slunk back into
its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and
capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows
whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
“No black woman writer in this culture can write
"too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too
much"...No woman has ever written enough.”
― bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
