Quotes to Write By

1. Quotes to Write By

2. What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.  • ~Cynthia Ozick • American Jewish short story writer and novelist, The Putterman Papers

3. Footfalls echo in the memoryDown the passage which we did not takeTowards the door we never opened~T.S. Eliot • Missouri born 20th century poet, The Wasteland

4. Leftovers in their less visible form are called memories.  Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and the cupboard of the heart.  • ~Thomas Fuller • New York Times Correspondent

5. The past is never dead, it is not even past.  • ~William Faulkner • Southern Writer, A Rose for Emily, As I Lay Dying

6. 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.  • ~Sylvia Plath • American writer, The Bell Jar

7. Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason.  They made no such demand upon those who wrote them.  • ~Charles Caleb Colton • English Cleric

8. How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.  • ~Henry David Thoreau • American Naturalist, Walden

9. My students were middle-class kids who were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about…I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable. • ~David Sedaris • American Humorist

10. A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here. • --Quentin Tarantino • Filmmaker, Django Unchained

11. “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” • ― Douglas Adams • The Salmon of Doubt

12. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” • ― Maya Angelou

13. “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.” • ― Madeleine L'Engle

14. “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” • ― Ernest Hemingway

15. “A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” • ― Maya Angelou

16. “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.” • ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

17. “Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” • ― Mark Twain

18. “If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” • ― Stephen King

19. “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” • ― Toni Morrison

20. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.” • ― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

21. “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” • ― Saul Bellow

22. “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” • ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

23. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.” • ― Lloyd Alexander

24. “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” • ― Anaïs Nin

25. “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.” • ― Sylvia Plath

26. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” • ― Robert Frost

27. “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” • ― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

28. “Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” • ― Virginia Woolf, A Room Of One's Own

29. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” • ― Philip Pullman

30. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

31. “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” • ― Stephen King

32. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.” • ― Winston S. Churchill

33. “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” • ― Anton Chekhov

34. “Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Thenwrite. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” • ― William Faulkner