Category Archives: Quotes about Writing

I’ve always craved that dizzying spell you find yourself under when reading a good story. I wanted to feel the power of creating such stories too. The act of writing is powerful, an opportunity for self-reflection, personal growth, and connection. It’s like good sex. The first story I read entirely on my own, outside ofContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Emily Rooks”

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story. Originality has nothing to do with producing something “new” – it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one worksContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Poet Billy Marshall Stoneking”

I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed I suppose. I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write. I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit. It hasContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author P.G. Wodehouse”

Art destroys silence. The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers. I try notContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Alicia Ostriker”

To write about the monstrous sense of alienation the poet feels in this culture of polarized hatreds is a way of staying sane. With the poem, I reach out to an audience equally at odds with official policy, and I celebrate our mutual humanness in an inhuman world. I would not recommend poetry as aContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Maxine Kumin”

An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart. Don’t misuse the pencil and don’t torment the paper. As I kept on writing I realized that the “what” came before the “how”…what I had to say was the most important thing and how to say itContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Uri Shulevitz”

I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It’s the only book I didn’t finish. I couldn’t get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance. Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don’t put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn’t say in realContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Maeve Binchy”

The novel cannot submit to authority. …it’s the reader who gets to sit on that mountain, in the sunshine, reading a perfect, finished piece. … The writer is, always, down in the valley, struggling with imperfect draft after imperfect draft. (The novel) … is written against official language, against officialdom, and against whatever fixed formContinue reading “Great Writing Quotes by Author Julian Gough”