c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
When I write, I write obsessively. I try to pace myself, but some fires are too hot to put out.
— Carla H. Krueger
My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.
— August Wilson
...with a click, my novel would be born; it would come out into the light suddenly transformed from the hypothetical text composed in my imagination into finished, tangible thing with a real and independent existence. The moment of clicking on the print button always gave rise to strange and powerful ambivalence--a combination of self-satisfaction, gloom and anxiety. Self-satisfaction for having finished writing the book. Gloom because taking my leave of the characters has the same effect on me as when a group of friends have to depart. And anxiety, perhaps because I am on the verge of delivering up into other people's hands something that I treasure.
— Alaa Al Aswany, The Automobile Club of Egypt
I'd be lying if I said killing off characters wasn't therapeutic in some way.
— Eliza Green
For the writer, madness should seep slowly out of them from the world they endure each day.
— Jason E. Hodges
Nothing in the world is like this-a bright white page withpale blue lines. The smell of a newly sharpened pencilthe soft hush of itmoving finallyone dayinto letters.
— Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
I lose it when I can't write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.
— Carla H. Krueger
Lyrics paved my teenage route to loving words. I take those passionate mini-stories with me everywhere.
— Carla H. Krueger
I think writing is like ministry. You get this call and you run before accepting it. If you run right to it, there's a good chance you were not called.
— Robin Caldwell
As an outsider I was free to pick my own literary traditions, to build my own system of literary values.
— Dubravka Ugrešić
There are as many ways to discover your story as there are to trip over a dog in the kitchen--and some of them feel about as planned.
— Jeffrey A. Carver, Now Write! Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror: Speculative Genre Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers
I don't believe in writers' block. Do doctors have 'doctors block?' Do plumbers have 'plumbers' block?" No. We all have days when we don't feel like working, but why do writers turn that into something so damn special by giving it a faintly romantic name.
— Larry Kahaner, AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War
On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.
— Anne Rice
I’m much more than a writer – I’m someone who puts different words together in an interesting way.
— Carla H. Krueger
When I write, it feels like there are two little creatures that sit on each of my shoulders. One whispers, "You can do this. You've got what it takes." The other sounds like my mother-in-law.
— Carla H. Krueger
Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually the writer must stall out into silence. The silence that waits for every writer and that, inevitably, if only with death, the writer must fall into is angst-ridden and terrifying—and often drives us mad. So if you're not a writer, consider yourself fortunate.
— Samuel R. Delany, About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
I’m an observer. I am fascinated by people and how their minds work (and, of course, my own). Why we are the way we are, why we do the things we do – and that interest drives my writing. I was a physicist before fiction claimed my soul, so I’m an experimenter. I’m open to different ways of thinking. I like exaggerating, making things up. I’m a very open, honest person in life and that’s the way it should be, but when it comes to fiction, I want to pour a few sharp objects into the comfort zone. Our fears are powerful, yet we’ve all got a desire to laugh and be entertained. I could have followed the same path I do now as a scientist, examining how the brain works. Ironically I get much more freedom to experiment as a writer. That’s why I love it.
— Carla H. Krueger
Writing is the neck muscle allowing us to see the important stuff in our periphery.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom . . .
— Philip Roth
Drama copies life in there being a sense of waiting, of a promise never fulfilled.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Words writers choose are a glimmering reflection into our souls.
— Lee Bice-Matheson-Matheson
Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.
— Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life
Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.
— Ralph Keyes
Writing is not a numbers game. You should focus more on reaching the hearts of readers and building fans more than publishing a plethora of books that no one may care about.
— Selena Haskins
Writing is like a blind man building a stone house with a limited amount of space and time. Brick after brick, row after row, feeling his way round and round. Turning stones into walls, rooms and towers. Relentlessly searching for doorways and windows, frequently replacing a stone or two here and there for a tighter fit. Often taking out entire walls that just feel out of place and sometimes, sadly, removing entire rickety rooms.
— Jack Henry Kraven
I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sense of detachment that sometimes makes the present seem like it is already past.
— Annie Rogers
There’s really only one good writing habit: You must write constantly.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Every moment offers a great opportunity to write.
— Rob Bignell, Editor, Writing Affirmations: A Collection of Positive Messages to Inspire Writers
Writing is transcendental. It is a form of expression, a form of art that you can take anywhere. That you can do anywhere. It poses the deepest questions in the universe. It generates emotion. It elicits empathy, promotes learning, creates an intellect you simply cannot get from any other medium. For me, it is air.
— Darynda Jones
A daily written thankful gratitude is a heavenly blessing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!
...writing Jeeves stories gives me a great deal of pleasure and keeps me out of the public houses.
— P.G. Wodehouse
What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course.
— Stephen King, La Torre Oscura VII - Tomo 2 of 2
Write to evolve and you'll evolve to write.
— Katina Ferguson
Forget how long the path to finishing your story. Address only what you have to write today.
— Martha Alderson, Before the Next Draft; 26 Plot Steps to Revision Plot eBook
He said: I don't like to read. And I said, honey, you haven't found the right girl.
— Chloe Thurlow, Sophie's Secret
Ignore people who say you can't do it, even if this person is yourself.
— Martha  Reed, The Choking Game
Writing is like a religion to those who don't practise, an act of faith for those who do.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
One of the ways to discover our toughness and resiliency is to look back at where we come from. (from Amazon description)
— Jeannette Walls
Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.
— Jonathan Heatt
When a writer dies, he becomes his books.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Coffee, my delight of the morning; yoga, my delight of the noon. Then before nightfall, I run along the pleasant paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg. For when air cycles through the lungs, and the body is busy at noble tasks, creativity flows like water in a stream: the artist creates, the writer writes.
— Roman Payne
I believe that we don't choose our stories," she began, leaning forward. "Our stories choose us." She paused and took a sip of water. Her hand, I noticed was steady.. "And if we don't tell them, then we are somehow diminished.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Writing is like breathing underwater. It's really hard to do unless you can imagine yourself a nice set of gills.
— Alane Adams, The Red Sun
I can tell you that the writing of a book, no matter how deeply, profoundly personal-if it is literature, if you have attended to the formidable task of illumination the human heart in conflict with itself-will do the opposite of expose you. It will connect you. With others. With the world around you. With yourself.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
So much of reading and writing to me is about being elsewhere, no matter how much I love where I am.
— Glen Hirshberg
Live first, write second.
— Miranda  Paul
The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.
— Elizabeth Berg, Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True
That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she’s often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she’s openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I’d learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down." - from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014
— Mitch Kellaway
Write and keep writing, not because people will like it, but because someone may get a kick out of thrashing your book.
— Magus Tor
My book sales are way down today. Also, I've received two scathing reviews. One of them calls me “a purveyor of insipid wet-dreams.
— Nenia Campbell, Bound to Accept
Beware of being only a writer.
— Miranda  Paul
Don’t ask for advice too much. Go with you, as gritty as that might be at times.
— Porochista Khakpour
In her spare time she scribbled her thoughts, wishes and dreams, life and times. It kept her sane despite her loneliness.
— Aporva Kala, Life... Love... Kumbh...
Writing is like trying to escape quicksand. The harder you try the faster you sink.
— Alane Adams, The Red Sun
I read the novel I had been writing for several months with an odd sense that it was the work of a stranger. I usually work in the dead hours of night and surprising the manuscript mid-morning revealed the flaws and excesses it was trying to conceal.
— Chloe Thurlow
One of the greatest gifts we can give someone is our undivided attention--a thought that whispers constantly in the ear of any author who respects their readers.
— Ella J. Fraser
Books are like horcruxes--without all the evil--because a piece of the author goes into each one.
— Ella J. Fraser
Time to turn some phrases and place them on these here pages.
— Michelle C. Hillstrom
He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossedaway from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases and assembled like a new life.
— Jeffry R. Halverson, The Mural
Writing is my joy, is my comfort zone, it strengthens my feeble knees and it frees my troubled heart.
— Euginia Herlihy
The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium.
— Norbet Platt
The highest kind of writing—which must not be confused withthe most ambitious kind…belongs to the realm of grace. Talent ispart of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws,absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfectharmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hiddendreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life—now thatcannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled uponthrough ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on alucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You mayhappen upon it without realising that this is the work throughwhich your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. Weshould always be humble. Creativity should always be a form ofprayer.
— Ben Okri
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
— Tim Kreider
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.
— Irwin Shaw
Writing doesn’t get any easier with time or talent. If writing is easy for you, you’re probably still learning the craft. You haven’t perfected your style or landed upon your “voice.” You haven’t learned to analyze your writing with a critical eye, to rip it apart and figure out why it isn’t doing exactly what you want.
— Darynda Jones
The beauty of writing is imagining new endings to a time of darkness, like burning off a morning fog with the heat and clarity of the sun.
— J.J. Brown
There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if ‘productivity’ and/or ‘usefulness’ are the measures of human value, and — particularly for artists — this is deeply problematic. We shouldn’t given in.
— Tasha Golden
If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . .What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn’t to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.Finding the right balance of feedback—encouragement versus vigorous criticism—will help immeasurably.But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.If it’s any consolation, I’m still working on this final lesson.
— Steve Almond
Rejection is part of the game. Or rather, rejection is part of the profession. A profession which at times can feel like a game.
— Robin    Black
Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium
—  it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in the dark.
Somebody told me I'm a writer. I believed them. Now I regret it.
— Stefanos Livos
Make your skin as thick as you are able to, for your career. Keep it as thin as you can tolerate, for your art.
— Robin    Black
A writer will always be a writer. It's not a choice, it's a destiny.
— Stephanie Lennox, The Authorship Program
What do you do when your head - your imagination is filled with tales to last a hundred lifetimes?You focus on the really good ones!
— Storm Princeholm
However, just like any line of work, writing is a negotiation, and creative control is as elusive as financial stability. I discovered that writing could be like cleaning carpets or working in a factory: just a meaningless production of words.
— Alice Driver
Writing only leads to more writing.
Of course, I tried to surround myself with other people like me whose dream of writing was a constant burden....
— Gerard Olson
I wanted to do it once. Be a writer. Now I'm near 70, and the only thing I have to show for it is dictionary entries. Don't get me wrong -- I'm incredibly proud of it all. But let me say this, and I'll say it just once: don't fool yourself into thinking you're just on a detour as you sail home for Ithaca. A little pit stop, if you like, with the Lotus-Eaters or Calypso. There's no Athena interceding on your behalf. No guarantee you'll eventually arrive. If there's something you really want in life -- especially if it's something that scares you, or you think you don't deserve -- you have to go after it and do it now. Or in not very long you'll be right: you won't deserve it.
— Alena Graedon, The Word Exchange
It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
— Tim Kreider
You are what you write.
— Ayah.A
Who knows why we do it? And when we've done it, nobody wants it. Still we keep doing it. That's what makes a writer a writer.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
Do whatever you have to do, avoid whatever you need to avoid, protect yourself however you need to protect yourself in order to stay on course, write, send the work out, write more, send out more work. Because as wonderful as the rest of it may be, conferences, twitter, writing groups, and so on, if they are more than you can handle, that’s okay. But if you stop writing and stop sending your work into the world, that is not okay. That is giving up.
— Robin    Black
Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world
— Ann Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
If I propose to myself and myself says yes, I get to have the cake, right? I love me, so I’m thinking 12 tiers.
— Michelle M. Pillow
Be an unstoppable force. Write with an imaginary machete strapped to your thigh. This is not wishy-washy, polite, drinking-tea-with-your-pinkie-sticking-out stuff. It's who you want to be, your most powerful self. Write your books. Finish them, then make them better. Find the way. No one will make this dream come true for you but you.
— Laini Taylor
For me, writing was the only way out.
— Anne Tyler, The Writer on Her Work
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
— Philip Pullman
The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Originality also brings on the most merciless attacks. The world resents originality in the beginning writer, and then rewards it abundantly once that writer has been successfully published. Cherish your own voice. Don't try to sound like anybody else. Sound like yourself and take the slings and arrows and keep going.
— Anne Rice
A novel is always more complicated than it seems at the beginning. Indeed a novel should be more complicated than it seems at the beginning.
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
Every day I must prove to myself I am a writer. The knowledge goes away in my sleep. What I wrote yesterday was paltry, meager, so flawed it is barely anything. Or, if it is good, I am no longer the person who could write it.
— Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life
Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yield to the tug of imagination. Ordinary people may practice for years to 'perfect' the challenge of writing; but the one destined to create and destroy with the stroke of a pen, the strike of the key, their wells of imagination shall never run dry.
— Brian A. McBride
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
If I don't stay in and write, I feel like a prisoner.
— Carla H. Krueger
I remember when I first began writing, I would spend maybe five or six hours on perhaps two paragraphs, and at the end of the day, not only were the paragraphs pretty terrible but I was also exhausted by the effort. I clearly wasn't in shape. You don't just tie on a pair of running shoes and go out and run a marathon. You have to be in running shape, just like you have to be in writing shape.
— Julie Tetel Andresen
...{N}othing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends.
— John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers
PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.
— Alexander Chee
Visual and performing artists produce art that lives in the present world. The art of the writer exists in another dimension. Through strings of words and phrases writers inspire their readers to imagine, to conjure images, to suspend disbelief, to enter a world visible only in their minds. It is in that unseen world where the art of the writer lives.
— Mindie Burgoyne
The Baby Name book can be a very dangerous tool in the hands of a prolific author.
— Michelle M. Pillow
I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean they can't behave like decent human beings.
— Gert Loveday, Writing is Easy
But if the Busyness = Status equation works, it’s strictly because a social game has emerged wherein relatively privileged, educated people with all kinds of Choice disguise their decisions to be busy as manifestations of the universe’s insatiable demand for their particular prowess. And the rest of us agree to be impressed. It’s a stupid game. We can stop any time.
— Tasha Golden
Still writing?" I usually nod and smile, then quickly change the subject. But here is what I would like to put down my fork and say: Yes, yes, I am. I will write until the day I die, or until I am robbed of my capacity to reason. Even if my fingers were to clench and wither, even if I were to grow deaf or blind, even if I were unable to move a muscle in my body save for the blink of one eye, I would still write. Writing saved my life. Writing has been my window -- flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence -- my way of interpreting everything within my grasp. Writing has extended that grasp by pushing me beyond comfort, beyond safety, past my self-perceived limits. It has softened my heart and hardened my intellect. It has been a privilege. It has whipped my ass. It has burned into me a valuable clarity. It has made me think about suffering, randomness, good will, luck, memory responsibility, and kindness, on a daily basis -- whether I feel like it or not. It has insisted that I grow up. That I evolve. It has pushed me to get better, to be better. It is my disease and my cure. It has allowed me not only to withstand the losses in my life but to alter those losses -- to chip away at my own bewilderment until I find the pattern in it. Once in a great while, I look up at the sky and think that, if my father were alive, maybe he would be proud of me. That if my mother were alive, I might have come up with the words to make her understand. That I am changing what I can. I am reaching a hand out to the dead and to the living and the not yet born. So yes. Yes. Still writing.
— Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outweighs the whole world.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I’m sorry if...I get too personal, if I make you uncomfortable, but writing is like one of the seven deadly sins, like Sharing on Mr. Rogers, and once you get the bug you’re trapped in The Neighborhood of Make-Believe forever.
— Shannon Celebi
I live, love and loathe my characters. They stole my mind. They stole my heart.
— Carla H. Krueger
Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label -- to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
And maybe it was fair; if a book was any good, it was a slap in the face to someone.
— John Irving, A Widow for One Year
A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
My best writing happens when I’m fighting to produce it.
— Carla H. Krueger
I still love the sound of breaking,the tearing of the page
— Dean Young
I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
May my mind be clear and my heart pure.
— Joanie Schirm
To write about a struggle amidst the struggling: one must hope that the muddling will end someday.
— Yiyun Li
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.
— Angeline Trevena
If you let yourself abandon the I-should-know-this-already attitude and simply accept your ignorance without giving yourself a hard time about it, then you can learn whatever it is you need to learn.
— Barbara Baig, How to Be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills Through Practice and Play
Because. Everything worth anything takes time.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Writing is making love under a crescent moon: I see shadows of what’s to come, and it’s enough; I have faith in what I can’t see and it’s substantiated by a beginning, a climax, an ending. And if it’s an epic novel in hand, I watch the sunrise amid the twigs and dewing grass; the wordplay is what matters.Simply put, I’m in love, and any inconvenience is merely an afterthought.The sun tips the horizon; the manuscript is complete. The author, full of profound exhaustion, lays his stylus aside. His labor of love stretches before him, beautiful, content, sleeping, until the next crescent moon stars the evening sky.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
Oh God, for a few who will love me in tiny ways every single day of my flashing existence. For a mere one or two who will treat me like the trash I am, who will love the smell of garbage and rummage through the bin of my failings to find the wrapped cheeseburger they can do without but consider long enough to get their taste buds used to the idea. Oh for a melodious tongue to sing me a song about french fries.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
Today I fed him right off the bat, and only checked Facebook twice.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I read a book, am vortexed in with no escape; my face contorts, eyelids frost, breath comes short, body longs, heart stop-starts. Who’s to say too much won’t kill me? Who’s to say I care?
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
Writing is a beast to tame, an energy to transform. Whip that toad into a prince and French kiss it to life. We start at the top but keep looking down, from macro to micro, from what could work to what does—but start with the dream. Nothing is real apart from the clouds, and all clouds pass with life in their wake—some rain thoughts.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty—done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy.And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” and there was a Book. And we saw that the Book was good.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
If a book can save—redeem us from the mediocrity of the mundane—surely, there must be a God.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I feign knowledge of writing: that I know something about it, that I should have learned something after all these years, that I might know something tomorrow. I read too much and write too little, or write too much and live too little. I have no classical education, no literary degree. I’m not specialized, Hugoed or geniusized; should I be writing at all? In this whole vast world, I’m a female peon sitting here at night wondering what it is I want to say. I aim for fluidity. But no, nix that line, that thought, this life. That’s the crux of it, isn’t it? This life: it’s out of reach. I’m not sure what I’m saying anymore.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Nonfiction. I didn’t choose it as much as it chose me. It squatted and birthed me one raw winter day then jerked me up and set me to scribing.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
I think that’s why I write—the not knowing and the blasted good feeling I get out of it all.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.
— Christy  Hall, The Little Silkworm
Writing makes me hard, like a fisherman, and brown from the heat. Tossing out and reeling in is a job for visionaries and those with calloused hands.
— Chila Woychik, On Being a Rat and Other Observations
When sitting in an armchair isn't enough… I write. What I mean is that when it no longer suffices to sit and dream about travelling to other times, other places, I write about them instead. A most economical and safe form of time travel.
— Anna Belfrage
A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you get that with every novel, but more so when you write about these epics of human suffering. I felt that just as much when I wrote about the Gulag. Every writer knows what that is. The process goes… you have to think: ‘This novel I am writing is no good.’ Then you have to think: ‘All my novels are no good.’ And then, when you reach that point, you can begin.
— Martin Amis
To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.
— Stendhal
To speak, to write , without charm is to make utterances without reference to a reality outside oneself. It is an act devoid of the playfulness of art, without the attractive humility of one who know absolutely that others exist and therefore feels drawn to please them, because to give them an instant of pleasure is to acknowledge their existence.
— Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind. The chances are that you'll never make them identical. That's one reason I'm still hitting the keyboard. Obsessed by the secrets of my past, I try to put metaphorical versions of them on the page, but each time, no matter how honest and hard my effort, what's in my mind hasn't been fully expressed, compelling me to keep trying. To paraphrase a passage from John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse," I'll die telling stories to myself in the dark. But there's never enough time. There was never enough time.
— David Morrell, The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing
Writing is not a hobby. Collecting stamps or coins is a hobby. Writing is a calling.
— Barbara Abercrombie, A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement
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 then shook his head in discouragement. "In my mind, they were a whole lot better."Isn't that the truth? Every morning, I go to my desk and reread yesterday's pages, only to be discouraged that the prose isn't as good as it seemed during the excitement of composition. In my mind, it was a whole lot better.Don't give in to doubt. Never be discouraged if your first draft isn't what you thought it would be. Given skill and a story that compels you, muster your determination and make what's on the page closer to what you have in your mind.
— David Morrell, The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing
The writing that so thrills and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing right next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.
— Annie Dillard
But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.
— Isabel Huggan, Belonging: Home Away from Home
A 15-minute gap in your day is plenty of time to write and read, but not if you check your email first.
— M.J. Pullen
I am the sum of my past experience.Some people have got a lot to answer for.
— Peter James West
Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning.
— Peter James West
On the way home, I saw a fist fight between an adverb and a pair of parentheses.I kept on walking.
— Peter James West
Caught red-handed for exclamation abuse.
— Buffy Andrews
I do not, can not write just for money. Lord knows I haven't made much. I write because it is what my Father has given me to do. I do not mean that He woke me one morn, put His finger to my forehead and commanded me write. I mean He quietly and gently in His grace, whispered into my head, into my heart: courage to fail, confidence to succeed, belief in my ability to learn and in my own self worth. So in thankfulness I write.
— Stanley Christopher
Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink
—  that will cure you of persiflage!
I read your diary. I KNOW.
— Mary Papas, 14 Twisted Tales To Enthrall
The only man she ever loved. And hated.
— Mary Papas, 14 Twisted Tales To Enthrall
It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
Research" is a wonderful word for writers. It serves as excuse for EVERYTHING
— Rayne Hall
To get over artist's block, make shitty art.
— Dave Horowitz
I trust my characters. They know their stories better than I do.
— Rayne Hall
The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of the writer.
— Mo Yan, Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. We may want our work to be recognized, but that is not the reason we write. We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community.
— bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work
Being blind is the worst possible thing and asking me to read and write no more is torture.
— Jessica E. Larsen
As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good. . .this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history. . .Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us. . .
— Lee Gutkind, You Can't Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction--from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between
Life is too short to dwell in the negativity all the time.
— Michelle M. Pillow
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
— Graham Greene
Writing a complete novel is time consuming, frustrating, nerve wrecking, and most of the time your work is under valued, under appreciated, and taken for granted. So why do authors do it? Because not writing at all, feels far worse.
— Carl Henegan
Indentations on the page, words, my friends, and I will share them with you.
— Victoria Sawyer, Angst
It is a truth universally acknowledged, he’d mused, that most people will never find their ‘call me Ishmael’.
— Django Wylie, The Middle
Another drink, another sentence, and the writing continues on. . . .
— Dennis R. Miller, One Woman's Vengeance
I feel the most alive when I write.
— Kristy Brown, Awakenings
Word count doesn't tell me when a story ends, my characters will tell me.
— Kristy Brown
Let your characters lead when you're dancing together.
— Caron Kamps Widden, Restoration
...I have this one nasty habit. Makes me hard to live with. I write......writing is antisocial. It's as solitary as masturbation. Disturb a writer when he is in the throes of creation and he is likely to turn and bite right to the bone... and not even know that he's doing it. As writers' wives and husbands often learn to their horror......there is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured. In a household with more than one person, of which one is a writer, the only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private, and where food can be poked in to him with a stick. Because, if you disturb the patient at such times, he may break into tears or become violent. Or he may not hear you at all... and, if you shake him at this stage, he bites...
— Robert A. Heinlein
Writing is the act of discovery.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
So I wonder what it is this need to tell.To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
— Peter Heller, The Dog Stars
Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as creator but seldom see "creator" as the literal term for "artist". I am suggesting you take the term "creator" quite literally. You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator. Accepting this concept can greatly expand your creative possibilities.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.
— Ron Carlson, Ron Carlson Writes a Story
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, or making friends. It's about doing what you love the best you know how. It's about making a heart pound in fear, shrink from rage, weep with understanding, or soar with excitement. It's about making worlds and living in them deeply enough someone else can join you there. It's about life changed to words, words changed to life, over and over and over again. It's about giving.
— Billie Sue Mosiman
When I started to learn how to read, I discovered the same kind of power. I could create an environment that I didn't have, and I could order this environment in the way that I couldn't in my actual life. Then, when I learned to write, I learned that I could do this not only for myself, but for other people. I could create whole things that were believable, at least to myself, at that point. And in this way, I began to wield an authority and a power that I had not had before. In other words, every child goes through this. Some pick football and some pick the library. I picked the library.
— Donald Richie, The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
Look for the little loves. Find and shape the little bitternesses.
— Ray Bradbury
I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.
— Shelby Foote
What happened was that sometimes I was, from a young age, put in the theater to watch movies because they kept me quiet and they kept me entertained, and they got me out from under the feet of my parents. So from a very early age, I went to the movies and I soon grew to prefer the life of the movies to my own life. The reality that the movies offered was preferable to the reality that I was experiencing. I became a child movie addict. I would go in with great pleasure and I'd never look at what was playing -- what was playing was unimportant. The fact was that I was entering a new world, an environment where not only was it much more attractive than my life was ordinarily, but also I could manipulate it to an extent by coming and going, and by looking at scenes or not, which I could not in my own life. I was subjected to my own domestic life. But I discovered a kind of power at the movies.
— Donald Richie, The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan
Journalism, to me, is just another drug – a free ride to scenes I'd probably miss if I stayed straight. But I'm neither a chemist nor an editor; all I do is take the pill or the assignment and see what happens. Now and then I get a bad trip, but experience has made me more careful about what I buy... so if you have a good pill I'm open; I'll try almost anything that hasn't bitten me in the past.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, 1968-1976
Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five...
— Richard Russo, Elsewhere
A key to a long, productive writing life is finding ways to support that life, emotionally and existentially.
— Eric Maisel, A Writer's San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul
I refuse to give up when things go wrong because there is always a sliver lining behind the cloud.
— Millicent Ashby
I do enjoy writing, and I hope someone gets something interesting out of this book. I already have. Now, If I ever have to write a book that is not about me, I may be totally stumped and have writer's block. We will see. Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn't know what to do next. You could hire someone to write it for you if you can't write it yourself. That doesn't seem to matter. Just don't hire some sweaty hack who asks you questions for years and twists them into his own vision of what is right or wrong. Try to avoid doing that.
— Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
No matter how many books I write, I will eventually get to fiction. That is where I'm going.
— Neil Young, Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream
Bulldogs are wonderful creatures to include in books. Besides their adorable bulldogishness, they provide the writer with a rare chance to use forms of the verb "snuffle.
— Rachelle McCalla
I don't think you can reach your potential as a writer unless you're a passionate reader, AND read passionately.
— Michelle D. Kwasney
It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.
— Anna Buchan
To write freely is to walk a joyous, terrifying, exhilarating path naked through the world of the fully clothed.
— Michele Garber
Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles