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Best Quotes About Writing

Because sometimes reading about writing is inspiring.

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Best Quotes About Writing
Jazz Writes and Sings for You

I've loved to write since I was little. I can remember getting a book binding kit for Christmas and being so excited about it because I could make my stories look professional. I don't know why I love writing so much. Maybe it's because I could never express myself through sports and writing allowed me to do that. Maybe it's because I am allowed a certain level of freedom in writing that I wouldn't otherwise have. Maybe it's because I can create my own people and places within my writing; I can create my own world. Whatever the reason, it has become my passion. Nothing gets me in the mood to write more than reading and, more specifically reading about writing. Here are some of my favorite quotes about writing! I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!

“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.” - Philip Roth

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” - Elmore Leonard

“I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.” - Ray Bradbury

“I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.” -Ray Bradbury

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.” - Ernest Hemingway

"Writers live twice." - Natalie Goldberg

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” - Virginia Woolf

"I almost always have the urge to write in first person...Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it." - William Zinsser

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature." - Ernest Hemingway

"Write while the heat is in you...The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which as cooled to burn a hole with." - Henry David Thoreau

“The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” - Andre Gide

“A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” - Angela Carter

"You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide.” - Marie de Nervaud

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” - Annie Dillard

Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood.” - Leslie Gordon Barnard

“Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives.” - James Alexander Thom

“Keep a small can of WD-40 on your desk—away from any open flames—to remind yourself that if you don’t write daily, you will get rusty.” - George Singleton

“Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.” - Annie Dillard

“Style means the right word. The rest matters little.” - Jules Renard

“Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at 15 to write several novels.” - May Sarton

“When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.” - Margaret Laurence

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” - Mark Twain

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.” - Lawrence Block

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