Writing Quotes

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

George Bernard Shaw

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Neil Gaiman

There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of. But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.

Orson Scott Card

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Stephen King

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Stephen King

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut

Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce.

Neil Gaiman

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Virginia Woolf

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Abraham Lincoln

...set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

Neil Gaiman

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

J.K. Rowling

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Mark Twain

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises

Neil Gaiman

one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Stephen King

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.

Stephen King

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

George Orwell

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

Abraham Lincoln