962 Quotes About Writing-life

If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison

What God has written for your life. No human being can alter it.

Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person’s capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

People give me looks of pity and ask me why I want to wallow in my disconnection from a very connected world. It is simple. The world seems way too connected to me now. It seems to be ruining the lives of teenagers and bringing out the bestial cruelty in those who can hide their vileness under the mask of some idiotic pseudonym. I like to sit alone and think about things. Solitude is as precious as coin silver and it takes labor to attain it.

Why does it seem as if the poorly adjusted people – the misfits and social outsiders – create art and the most sane and rational of the human species make money? Does creating art require a person to tap into the irrational magma of their soul?

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it