c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
If you see good circumstances around you, you tend to feel good and attract good things to you. If you see negative things around you, you tend to feel bad and likewise attract negative things to yourself.
— David Che, Total Law of Attraction: Unleash Your Secret Creative Power To Get What You Want!
Fears are nothing more than a state of mind.
— Napoleon Hill, Law of Success: The 21st-Century Edition
Everything is energy. You are an energy magnet, so you electrically energize everything to you and electrically energize yourself to everything you want
— Rhonda Byrne
The soul attracts that which it secretly harbors - that which it loves, and also that which it fears.
— Jeff Wheeler
There's a lid for every pot.If you don't get out much, they'll have a wreck in yard.NOTHING will keep your soulmate from you.You have EVERY hope for love.
— Kathryn Alice
That which you fix your heart to, believing with all your desire you will get, you will.
— Jeff Wheeler, The Wretched of Muirwood
It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people's educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.
— Ian McEwan, Atonement
You will learn no more once you have decided you know
— Kirsten Beyer, Protectors
If a messiah exhorts you to kill people of another belief system, get this idiot non-prophet out of your stupid system.
— Fakeer Ishavardas
Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?
— Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things
Papers ,Always Welcome you with an Emty space to full it ,they wont judge or Mind...
— Khaireddine Safwane
Seek knowledge.Learning has no end.Learning makes you forever young.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
— Gustave Flaubert
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger than Fiction
In order to write about life first you must live it.
— Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
— David Lindsay-Abaire
It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
you once said to would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing one self to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind...That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".
— Shubham Choudhary
The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.
— Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary
Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task -- such as watching television, going out socially or sleeping -- I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something.
— Isaac Asimov
Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.
— Greg Sisco
The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead
— Warren Adler
When you can't enter through the front door, kick in a window.
— Liz Fichera
And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.
— Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing
... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.
— Monique Wittig
When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.
— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Writers are a superior breed. No one else can face so much rejection and still thrive.
— Susie Smith
I should be writing ...
— Mur Lafferty
A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
— David Foster Wallace
I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.
— Rod Serling
Some words may make you happy, some may make you said. Maybe some will make you angry. What I hope. . . what I hope is that something will whisper in your ear.
— Patricia MacLachlan, Word After Word After Word
In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
— Gore Vidal
The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.
— Javier A. Robayo
Writing is my life. Life is my hobby.
— Emma Lai
Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
I realized I was officially a professional writer when all my plans began with "drink coffee" and ended with "take a nap.
— Cassandra Duffy
Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry.
— Neil Gaiman
I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.
— Ernest Hemingway
Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . . . if only to reach but a few.
— James D. Maxon
The next best thing after finishing writing a chapter is starting a new one.
— Chris Almeida
You never have to change anything you get up in the middle of the night to write.
— Saul Bellow
I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you,and that you will work with these stories from your life--not someone else's life--water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom. That is the work. The only work.
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
— Ray Bradbury
In the middle of a novel, a kind of magical thinking takes over. To clarify, the middle of the novel may not happen in the actual geographical centre of the novel. By middle of the novel I mean whatever page you are on when you stop being part of your household and your family and your partner and children and food shopping and dog feeding and reading the post—I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle. The middle of a novel is a state of mind. Strange things happen in it. Time collapses.
— Zadie Smith
My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.
— Pierre Berton
They say everything that can be written has been written. I say we are just getting started.
— Andrew Barger, Mailboxes - Mansions - Memphistopheles: A Collection of Dark Tales
When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.
— Richard B. Knight
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
— Igor Stravinsky
I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
— Louis L'Amour
Creating characters is easy. It’s getting them to behave that’s the problem.
— Steven Ramirez
It’s amazing how fast you can write when there’s a gun to your head.
— Steven Ramirez
Love the work: the grind, the dreaming, the distracted not-sleep, all of it. It’s the one thing in the job that will always be there, and the real pleasure in the profession. Everything else is luck.
— Glen Hirshberg
Without a doubt the two best words in the English language are The End
— Ken Scott
To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in.
— Steven Ramirez
Some days being a writer consists of telling yourself you aren't insane, your characters are.
— Nevea Lane
But when I say it isn't meant for anyone's eyes, I don't mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don't care if anyone else ever reads it or not.The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don't know how to tell the story, or they don't understand what the story is, or they haven't really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer is the story.
— Katharine Weber, The Music Lesson
So here I am writing my zombie story and my lead character decides to betray me.
— Steven Ramirez
Delicious days ahead for solitude and writing and, oh yes, the holiday meal with family. Live with my characters until term starts in 2012!
— Stella Atrium
Art is too often discounted as a secondary priority. The writer is necessary to society.
— Kayla Rae Whitaker
I have a great many opinions about writing, but I'm afraid that all of them are unprintable
— Alfred Lansing
MFA in a Box is designed to help you to find the courage to put truth into words and to understand that writing is a life-and-death endeavor — but that nothing about a life-and-death endeavor keeps it from being laugh-out-loud funny.
— John Rember, MFA in a Box
No one ever does the last thing on their list.
— Ariel Gore
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
— Orson Scott Card
But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, "Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.
— Frank Herbert
Everything is research.
— Court Ellyn
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
— Seamus Heaney, Station Island
And here you see me working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of sharing in the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.
— Charles Dickens, The Haunted House
A freelance writer is paid per word, per piece, perhaps.
— Isaac Bashevis Singer
If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.
— John McPhee
When I consider writing I sometimes wonder why doesn't everybody do it, other times I wonder why does anybody do it.
— Tonny K. Brown
Authors, such as William Zinsser, Steven Pinker, Natalie Goldberg, and Stephen King, who have all written exquisite books on the art and craft of writing, have reminded me that it is the commitment to the craft that matters the most; the longing to get better and the countless hours of work that go into writing and rewriting. To them I am eternally grateful.
— Gudjon Bergmann
Perfectionism is the enemy of the author. There is a difference between good writing habits and perfectionism. The author who displays good writing habits delivers on time. The aspiring author who is prone to perfectionism will likely never fin...
— Gudjon Bergmann
Most of my writing life, to be perfectly honest, is not freaky, old-timey, voodoo-style Big Magic. Most of my writing life consists of nothing more than unglamorous, disciplined labor. I sit at my desk and I work like a farmer, and that's how it gets done. Most of it is not like fairy dust in the least.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.
— Roman Payne
I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)
— Roman Payne
Writing is more about telling other peoples' stories than your own
— Carla H. Krueger
It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad’s garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who’s just landed a job with Marco Pierre White? There’s no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there’s a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It’s a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we’re wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating. It’s acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it’s a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever.
— Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm
writing is vulnerable is power is freedom.
— Anna  Quinn
What power--what importance--lies in the blank lines of an open notebook. Go and fill yours. Then share.
— Penny Kittle, Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing
Writing is like surfing on a wild sea, in the middle of a moonless night, in a hailstorm, on a deserted island.Yeah... that about sums it up.
— Heena Rathore P.
There are times when I can't believe how much ridiculous stuff happens to me and how brilliant it is to be in a position to write about it.
— Carla H. Krueger
By living, thinking, even dreaming the story in one continuous process, ideas came faster and faster. Sometimes the typewriter keys would fly so fast that I wondered if my fingers could keep up with them. And at the finish of the story I often had to take a few days off as my fingertips were too sore to begin work on the next book.
— Walter B Gibson
A real piece of writing is one in which the writer has tried to enrich not only the book, but also his understanding of the words. The words themselves have to be open to new ideas and suggestions, and the writer himself must have the audacity to attempt new things and to risk failure
— Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm
Every one of the big breakthroughs in the art of literature have possibly started as what many would call a ludicrous or even laughable idea as the writer occasionally balances a routine piece with an investment in the eccentric and untried. Over time, the reward is usually worth the risk
— Karl Wiggins, Self-Publishing In the Eye of the Storm
RACHEL MADDUX | ON STAYING HUNGRY Hunger is everything because it’s nothing - not yet - just raw promise, one lack that may eclipse others: talent, pedigree, luck. Like sharks, the hungry must always keep moving, hunting, killing, “killing it.” - Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living
— Rachael Maddux
There is nothing to writing. You nourish your creativity for months and years until you release your baby out into the world.
— Lydia Larue
He stares now at the three words he has written.They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it; jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can't move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It's not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.
— Jo Baker, A Country Road, A Tree
Dreams are there for those who dare to dream them.
— R.K. King
Lately, I usually write at the desk in my living-room or bedroom. From time to time, our red and stripy cat named Foxy decides to be my companion, poking his curious caramel-colored nose to the screen, watching me typing, and making attempts to put his paws on the keyboard despite the fact that he knows he is not allowed to; he also loves to arrange “sunbathing sessions for himself, purring joyfully while lying with his belly up under the lamp placed to the left of my computer; and, of course, the cat can’t wait for when I happen to have a snack, to beg for some treats that seem to him tastiest if eaten from a caring human’s hand.
— Sahara Sanders
Only a writer holds conversations between people that don't exist. We don't talk to ourselves. We talk to people we created from nothing.#FromTheInternet #AuthorUnknown
— Unknown
You need the devotion to your work that a priest of God has for his.
— Ernest Hemingway
When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.
— Samuel Colbran, Lake Merrin
Imagination, curiosity, passion, creativity these are the words that move me!
— Samuel Colbran, Lake Merrin
I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
— Graham Greene
The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
Don't worry about the consequences, just be a writer!
— Samuel Colbran, Lake Merrin
No art ever came out of not risking your neck.
— Eudora Welty
Even a baby can write a poem. It doesn't guarantee the sale.
— Bhavik Sarkhedi, The C to T of Content Marketing
I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.
— Cynthis Ozick
Writing, unfortunately, takes last priority for my time but it's the first priority in my heart I wish I had all the time for. Such is reality.
— Veronica Purcell, In Anwar's Care
All it takes is one word, one action, one voice. Believe in yourself, and you can accomplish anything!
— Samuel Colbran, Lake Merrin
Writing at its best is simply taking dictation from your soul.
— Catherine Carrigan
‏Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work.
— Grace Paley
With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children—you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it.
— Sahara Sanders, INDIGO DIARIES: A Series of Novels
In reading we live hundreds lives, in writing we live thousands of lives.
— R.M. Donaldson
The more you doubt your talent and strive to improve, the better the writer.
— Stephanie Ayers
Never underestimate the power of the written word, especially when you put them down in your own voice." -Cheryl L. Ilov, Forever Fit and Flexible: Feeling Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond.
— Cheryl L. Ilov, Forever Fit and Flexible: Feeling Fabulous at Fifty and Beyond
If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.
— James Baldwin
What a lover of words and their beauty discovers. . .is that there is literally a word for every object, material or immaterial, every relation, and every process that human beings have experienced. Because that is what words are: the crystallization in language of thousands of years of experience across numerous cultures and civilizations, each word being the most tangible flesh in which thought is tabernacled.
— Charles Johnson, The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
The biggest laughs are based on the biggest disappointments and the biggest fears.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…
— Harlan Ellison
For life, it's very, very bad to be sensitive, but for a writer, it's very good.
— Karl Ove Knausgård
Read more, Write anything, Earn Everything
— fahrudin
I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I’ll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.
— Troye Sivan
Everyone, except a writer, thinks writing is easy. Writing is tough. Being a disciplined writer is tougher.
— Tarang Sinha
Frankly, if there ever was a time when I was really happy, it wasn't during those first intoxicating moments of my success, but long before that, when I hadn't yet read or shown my manuscript to anyone -- during those long nights of ecstatic hopes and dreams and passionate love of my work, when I had grown attached to my vision, to the characters I had created myself, as though they were my own offspring, as though they really existed -- and I loved, rejoiced and grieved over them, at times even shedding quite genuine tears over my guileless hero.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Insulted and Humiliated
If I don't write every single day, I feel like I am off balance. My mind does not work correctly. I actually feel a sensation like an ache going on inside me equivalent to when a person misses a loved one.
— Levon Peter Poe
People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful—the myth of the "lonely writer," the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliché, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as a Sufferer and a Rebel.Probably any of the arts that are not performed in a chorus-line are going to come in for a certain amount of romanticizing, but it seems to me particularly bad to do this to writers and especially fiction writers, because fiction writers engage in the homeliest, and most concrete, and most unromanticizable of all arts. I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself.
— Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
For the curious, I write
— Veronica Purcell, I'm Kita Duran
I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
— Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia
In the best interest of profession, a writer should sometimes refrain from writing.
— Ramana Pemmaraju
Reading/writing is a chance to live a different life in a different world.
— Tarang Sinha
Too many stories. Not enough Tim.
— Timothy Trimble
The prose is deeply inspired by the tension between post- totalitarianism and consumer democracy. I am constantly probing the soft fleshy parts of the American dream.
— Alina Stefanescu, Driftwood Press: Volume Two, Issue Two
When one stops writing one becomes oneself again, the person one usually is, in terms of occupations, thoughts, language. Thus I am now me again, I am here, I go about my ordinary business, I have nothing to do with the book, or, to be exact, I entered it, but I can no longer enter it.
— Elena Ferrante, La frantumaglia
Writing helps maintain my sanity or else I would lose my mind.
— M.J. Masucci, Spark: Book 1
If you're doing it right... you should feel while you're doing it that you're revealing a little too much of yourself.
— Neil Gaiman
Life is about showing up, so is writing. That’s why I sit at my desk every day and dance my fingers across the keyboard
— Laurie Buchanan, PhD
Writers are the wind that sail words across the page.
— Laurie Buchanan, PhD
Yes, writing is that easy. Yes, writing is that hard. But if you want to do it you can. Only you can stop you.
— R.M. Donaldson
Write what you love. Passion is the key to a good story.
— R.M. Donaldson
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
— May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep
Fame is a spiritual drug. It is often a by-product of our artistic work, but like nuclear waste, it can be a very dangerous by-product.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way
Writing is one means to investigate the mystique of life. Each fresh page is an unsullied canvas that an inquisitive writer employs to explore the poetic transience behind their existence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Language is a tool for communicating and not a barrier to writing
— Bernard Kelvin Clive
And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?I behaved like a starving man who knows there is food somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman.
— May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep
All good writers are thieves. The best get away with a heist.
— Michael Stutz
Ninety percent of writing is about listening.
— Natalie Goldberg
A writer seeks to discover a lucid state of creative consciousness uncoiling from a boule of internal disequilibrium and dutifully attempts to bridge that cavernous divide between the known and the unknown and articulate raw truths.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
What nobody tells you is that spending an entire day being paid to do something you love is sometimes a lot less fun than spending an entire day doing something you love for free.
— Allison K. Williams, Get Published in Literary Magazines: The Indispensable Guide to Preparing, Submitting and Writing Better
The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Well-developed characters will ruin your writing plans every time. You may think you know where you're going with a story, but they have other ideas.
— Quinn Anderson
It’s not words, but years we should be editing. Remember: time spent on bad art is a form of redundancy, doing the same thing twice is a form of tautology, and wasting precious moments complaining about life is a form of pleonasm. We should all learn to live our lives concisely.
— Anthony Marais
May the words come easy, the doubt be weak, and the coffee strong enough to eat through steel. (I don't drink coffee...but I understand most authors do, and they like it with a bit of fight in it.) Now, let us boot up, sit down, and accrue those daily page counts!
— G. Allen Cook
Always write as if you will never have the blessed chance to write again, so this has to be the best thing you've ever done. Do that, and it will be.
— Joe Gores
Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Live a life worth reading about. Then write it.
— Chris Campanioni, Death of Art
Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person’s level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Contemplation and writing demand solitude, which leads to a sorry feeling of isolation and detachment. Writers try to call their loneliness genius, and the world believes them most of the time.
— Anthony Marais
How do you thank someone like Woody Allen or Milan Kundera—when they have shared ideas with you that are no less than life-saving, when they have given you some of your happiest moments, sharing what they have learned like a parent or a friend? Do you hunt them down and shake their hand? Do you ask for their autograph? Would that even the balance? And how do you thank Orson Welles or Oscar Wilde—people who are no longer with us? There is only one way to show your gratitude, and that is to give their precious gift back, return it the way you received it: write.
— Anthony Marais
When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal... and then continue with your writing.
— Joanna Penn, The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer's Journey
When you feel that creeping self-doubt, acknowledge it. Write down your feelings in your journal in your journal... and then continue with your writing.
— Joanna Penn, The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer's Journey
Being a writer is not just about typing. It’s also about surviving the rollercoaster of the creative journey.
— Joanna Penn, The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer's Journey
When you start out writing, your inner creative is just a little seedling with tiny leaves above the earth, peeping out into the air for the first time.
— Joanna Penn
Half hating, half loving, this free time between writing books.
— K.J. Mecklenfeld
At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer’s compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the THERE itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?
— Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1
Only my characters truly know what's happening - I just hold the pen
— Sandra J. Jackson
I can't do anything else until the words in my head are set free.
— Sandra J. Jackson
At last something important had occurred, something that she ought to write down. But she did not know how to explain what had happened, how everything had changed in just one day, how someone she loved so dearly could be there one minute, and the next minute: gone.
— Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You
Writing... is 90 percent listening. You listen so deeply to the space around you that it fills you, and when you write, it pours out of you...You don't only listen to the person speaking to you across the table, but simultaneously listen to the air, the chair, and the door. And go beyond the door. Take in the sound of the season, the sound of the color coming in through the windows. Listen to the past, future, and present right where you are. Listen with your whole body, not only with your ears, but with your hands, your face, and the back of your neck.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
Writing, for me, makes the world shiver and flame with meaning.
— Lauren B. Davis
But perhaps people who liked to write aways made lists! Just for the fun of it.
— Maud Hart Lovelace
The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.
— Katerina Stoykova Klemer
Everything I write is sinful, full of lies, especially the big one, the one you go to hell for: pretending not to be a fool.
— Sallie Tisdale, Violation: Collected Essays by Sallie Tisdale
Every time I write about life, I must kill and eat the actual event. I mean to say that my words are scavengers who need to devour lifeless substance if they are to survive as non-fiction. The event is dead, it ceased to be as soon as it happened. The closest I can come to resurrecting the past is to feed my memories to a ravenous swarm of sentences, punctuation and paragraphs. They chew up and digest the things I remember, producing a waste product I think of as an honest account. Reality suffers a second death through this process. False memories, both organic and manufactured, erase the genuine article in order to reassemble the factors into a serviceable construct. True story.
— Alex Bosworth, Chip Chip Chaw!
If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing then you are a writer”"Se alla mattina quando ti alzi non pensi altro che allo scrivere allora sei uno scrittore
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I have great respect for you - once you are dead, and gone
— Fakeer Ishavardas
I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart . . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts . . .
— Elena Ferrante
I love pleasure of reading, writing and dancing.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Half the urge to write is the premonition that later the thought I am having might disappear so I had better write it down while I still have the inclination, however overshadowed this desire is by indolence.
— Wayne Koestenbaum, My 1980s and Other Essays
You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.
— R.L.Stine
Writing is the spectrum through which the chaos of life can be seen, studied and understood.
— Stewart Stafford
Reading is sexy. Women who read are suspect. Women who write dangerous.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Open your soul and put it out there and dare the world to read it, ready to have them stomp on you and laugh, but ready to do it again the next day.
— Dan Alatorre
I am made of words. When you cut me, I bleed sentences. When you read me, I speak to your soul.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
It is infinitely easier to experience an indescribable experience than to describe it.
— Kevin Focke
Words are living things.
— Eric Onyango Otieno, Touring My Mind
Here's one prophecy the writer can make - you'll never be rich and you'll probably be poor.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Gift of Girls
Writing is draining. Every word is like lifting a stone and levering it into place. Your head aches, your muscles ache and every word you conjure up is heavier than the last one.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
Life. Is a sentence, therein, weave your story toward freedom.
— JT Sanz
Writing isn't something you do because you feel like it. You never feel like it. You write because there's a rat in your brain chewing up the spirals of your DNA and you want to get the words down before they disappear.
— Chloe Thurlow, Katie in Love
The best part of being a writer is you get to tell people you’re a writer. That’s still considered cool.
— Dan Alatorre
You always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. Glinda the Good Witch
— Susan  Boles
Live to write. Write to inspire. Inspire to write.
— Chi Wen
Why the tag of ‘aspiring’ writer be the wishful cliché? It’s like a bumper sticker. Say it! I am a Writer. Period. We may all have a target and gradation toward successes, a personal illusion/perception. The quality or perseverance in one’s craft is your act. Flaws? Sure. Yet, you are a Writer, not a wannabe. Let go of the tags. Just write!
— JT Sanz
I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I’m a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki
— Andrew James Pritchard
But very little of it can do morethan start you on your way to the real, unimaginablydifficult goal of writing memorably. That work is doneslowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carryingwater in a sieve.
— Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook
As a writer, the main skill you need is curiosity. As a reader, the main tool you need is open-mindedness.
— Gloria D. Gonsalves
Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
— Ernest Hemingway
Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies—in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicatea preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world—among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees.
— Mary Oliver
Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.--Fire Up Your Writing Brain
— Susan Reynolds
There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.
— Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?
The life of sensation is the life of greed
—  it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less
The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Writing a book is burning your brain to enlighten another man's mind
— Bangambiki Habyarimana
Write what you want to write. That's the only advice a writer will ever need.
— Chloe Thurlow, The Fifty Shades of Grey Phenomena
Words writers choose are like a glimmering reflection into our souls.
— Lee Bice-Matheson, Destiny's Gate
Never wait for your muse. Train him/her to show up to work when you do by pushing on. It's a dominant submission thing.
— Darynda Jones, First Grave on the Right
Writing is a bit like going on a diet
—  you should either tell everyone or no one.
Process is nothing
—  erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over
Every book contains a secret – even the writer doesn't always know what it is.
— Carla H. Krueger
I regret always writing, writing. I gave my kid the whole plastic bag of marshmallows,so i could have 20 minutes to write. I sat at my mother's deathbed, writing.I did swab her mouth with water, and feel her pliant tongue enjoy water, then harden and die. Before I had language, before I had stories, I wanted to write. That desire is going away. I've said what I have to say. I'll stop and look at things I called distractions. Become a reader of the world, no more writer of it.
— Maxine Hong Kingston, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
The biggest difference between writing a movie and writing a novel? No one ever tries to sleep with me to get into one of my novels.
— Mylo Carbia, The Raping of Ava DeSantis
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
— Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
The most lies we will ever tell in our lives will be to ourselves.
— Carla H. Krueger
Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.
— Carla H. Krueger
Becoming a writer does not mean words will suddenly flow with perfection from your pen. It takes hard work, rejection, and the willingness to lay everything inside you out for the world to see.
— Jason E. Hodges
Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft 
— Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet
Books are like rivers, meandering this way and that, but taking us on a steady, flowing course to somewhere different.
— Carla H. Krueger
It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don’t often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I’ve always known existed around me and within me.
— Casey Curry
It's better to be remembered for what you said, not what you earned.
— Carla H. Krueger
Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite.
— Meg Cabot
Writers, by nature, are going to be slightly more delusional than others because we're dreamers, we imagine the unlikely, that's how we create... Rather than hoping my delusion becomes a reality, I'd prefer to keep on being deluded, to dream bigger and to imagine greater. My greater worry would be becoming less delusional .
— Rowena Wiseman
It probably seems obvious, but as an editor, I love stories. But it’s a little bit more than that. I intensely believe that stories have power. They can spark an idea, or a realization. They can, by just offering another perspective, change a person’s mind. They can make us weep and cry and care. And they can connect us. That’s powerful stuff.
— Mariah Huehner, Whedonistas!: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them