Writing quotes
What really counts are good endings, not flawed beginnings. 
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it. 
A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. 
Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. 
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for. 
In order to write about life first you must live it. 
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book. 
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. Humor + Writing quotes ⇑
Humor Quotes
If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. 
Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it 
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. 
The first draft of anything is shit. 
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen. 
I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room. 
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow. 
All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. 
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody. 
Give me just enough information so that I can lie convincingly. 
Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. 
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter. 
I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. 
Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke. 
If you're horrible to me, I'm going to write a song about it, and you won't like it. That's how I operate. Short + Writing quotes ⇑
Short Quotes
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. 
In writing, you must kill all your darlings. 
To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. 
Write what should not be forgotten. 
If a story is in you, it has to come out. 
nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing. All writing Quotes ⇑
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.
To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.
One should use common words to say uncommon things
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will.
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
The person born with a talent, they are meant to use will, find their greatest happiness in using it.
Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.
There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.
If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
The difference between the 'almost right word' and the 'right word' is really a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
With writing, we have second chances.
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
I want to do something splendid... Something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead... I think I shall write books.
Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
It's amazing that a man who is dead can talk to people through these pages. As long as this book survives, his ideas live.
Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.
A word after a word after a word is power.
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.
Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.
Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.
While I'm writing, I'm far away; and when I come back, I've gone.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'.
So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
Don't forget - no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.
I can't write without a reader. It's precisely like a kiss-you can't do it alone.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can't quite keep up with gravity.
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.
You can fix anything but a blank page.
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible
I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.
My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
Personally, I believe “Young Adult” to be an arbitrary title that means the book "Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who's not quite an adult/Isn't really boring.
Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever.
Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.