Writing Craft Quotes

That's the good thing about writing. You don't need any special degree or anything to do it. You just do it.

Chris Stocking

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

Janet Burroway

God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.

Gerard de Marigny

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

Stephen King

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Roman Payne

...the most beautiful things don't always make you happy - often they make you weep...

John Geddes

And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. someone may say. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

Stephen King

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

C.S. Lewis

A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.

Stephen King

Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Albert Einstein

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.

Ernest Hemingway

So I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting though the being read less so. One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with ones words.

Virginia Woolf

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Neil Gaiman

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

George Bernard Shaw

I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.

Orson Scott Card

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell