1,024 Quotes About Writing-process

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

Who knows how things happen when one is on a quest or writing a book? It is as if one searches and searches and then, if one can move past the ego's demands and is lucky, sometimes a space opens where books seem to fall open in one's lap and things and people appear, as if magically, to help. Some call it synchronicity or being in the flow; I find it to be a blessed, though often short-lived, state of grace for which I am deeply grateful.

Writing is easy. Saying something that would make a difference is the task.

If your screen stays blank or your notepad empty, God cannot use your words.

Conversely, bad writers often write in order to forward a cause or enlarge other people’s understanding of a contemporary social issue. Any attempt to write fiction in order to make the world a better, fairer place is almost certain to fail.

Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.

We are writing the history of our time.

Criminal profiling is the writing process in reverse. Writers create characters and project their actions forwards into a timeline. Profilers are left with the aftermath of an offender's behaviour and must extrapolate backwards to establish their characteristics.

Whenever I feel sad, I just take out my phone and listen to her laughter recorded in my online messenger.