“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou
“Every writer I know has trouble writing.” ~ Joseph Heller
“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” ~ Stephen King
“[As a writer] you have to have the three D’s: drive, discipline and desire. If you’re missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it’s going to be really hard to get anything done.” ~ Nora Roberts
“If you wait for inspiration to write you’re not a writer, you’re a waiter.” ~ Dan Poynter.
“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.” ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Write from the heart. A book without a pulse is like a person without a spirit.” ~ Linda Radke
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.” ~ George R.R. Martin
“In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.” ~ Junot Diaz
“Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch.” ~ Lili St. Crow
“Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters.” ~ A. Lee Martinez
“The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.” ~ Martin Amis (Author)
“You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.”~ Paul Simon
“There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments—moments of sustained creation—when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.”~
E.B. White
“I write because there are things in me that cannot die.” ~ Sanober Khan
“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a “capacity for clear thought,” able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They’re geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.” ~ James J. Kilpatrick
“There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises….If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do what’s honest,
not what pays” ~ Toni Morrison
“To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.” ~ Deborah Levy
“Writing, music, sculpting, painting, and prayer! These are the three things that are most closely related! Writers, musicians, sculptors, painters, and the faithful are the ones who make things out of nothing. Everybody else, they make things out of something, they have materials! But a written work can be done with nothing, it can begin in the soul! A musical piece begins with a harmony in the soul, a sculpture begins with a formless, useless piece of rock chiseled and formed and molded into the thing that was first conceived in the sculptor’s heart! A painting can be carried inside the mind for a lifetime, before ever being put onto paper or canvass! And a prayer! A prayer is a thought, a remembrance, a whisper, a communion, that is from the soul going to what cannot be seen, yet it can move mountains! And so I believe that these five things are interrelated, these five kinds of people are kin.” ~ C. JoyBell C.
“Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.” ~ William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
“I used to be afraid about what people might say or think after reading what I had written. I am not afraid anymore, because when I write, I am not trying to prove anything to anyone, I am just expressing myself and my opinions. It’s ok if my opinions are different from those of the reader, each of us can have his own opinions. So writing is like talking, if you are afraid of writing, you may end up being afraid of talking” ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana
“I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.”~ Dean Wesley Smith
“Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.” ~ J.K. Rowling
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.” ~Samuel Johnson