Writing Philosophy Quotes

“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

“we write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are.”
― Tahereh Mafi

“Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. ...this book...is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.
Drink and be filled up.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies.”
― V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

“Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.”
― Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out. He would write it because he felt he had to.”
― Stephen King, The Shining

“We write to make sense of it all.”
― Wallace Stegner

“Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.”
― April Genevieve Tucholke, Wink Poppy Midnight

“If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac.”
― Tiffany Madison

“I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM.”
― Tiffany Madison

“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, Pearls Of Eternity

“I never waited for my Irish Cream coffee to be the right temperature, with a storm happening outside and my fireplace crackling ... I wrote every day, at home, in the office, whether I felt like it or not, I just did it.”
― Stephen J. Cannell

“Because here’s the thing: No matter how much one tells stories of magical beasts or impossible worlds, in the end, it is always the world of here and now one is writing about. The better one understands that world, the more powerful the stories will be.”
― Steven Brust

“One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into
a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.
Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,
physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.”
― Niyi Osundare

“It is immoral not to tell.”
― Albert Camus

“The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.”
― Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama

“هناك آلاف يكتبون القصص والشعر ويؤلفون..أي إنسان عادي باستطاعته أن يروي تجربة شخصية مرت به أو حادثة رآها أو تصورها بطريقة تجذب الانتباه وتخضع لمقاييس الفن، ولكن، لماذا لا يصبح كل هؤلاء أدباء كبارا، لماذا نجد الكبار في كل بلد أو جيل آحاد أو حتى معدودين .. السبب أن هناك فارقا كبيرا بين كاتب القصة أو المسرح الناجح وبين الفنان الكبير الذي يغير بإنتاجه معتقدات الناس ويترك العالم على غير ما جاءه، السبب في رأيي هو خيط الفكر أو الفلسفة الذي لابد من وجوده ..... فالفكر هو روح الفن”
― توفيق الحكيم, ملامح داخلية

“Writers are like supreme beings. We can create worlds in a matter of days and we can destroy them just as fast.”
― Linda Nelson

“There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The power of a writer is that he is a god of sorts. He can create his own worlds and populate them with his own people, all by the powers of his imagination. It's the closest a man can come close to the gods. No wonder the most successful writers are considered immortals”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“If you're a writer, write. And always strive for excellence.”
― Linda Yezak

“I want people to react to my work, to think, to question, to challenge, to cry and laugh and feel.”
― Josh Lanyon

“We will need to find people who will provide a safe writing space for us, where criticism comes late and love and delight come early.

—from Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing”
― L.L. Barkat

“I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.”
― Mark Twain

“A writer is never alone, he is always with himself”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Fiction gives us a reach into the lives of individuals that would otherwise be but a closed door. If we are gifted with a desire to tell tales, then we should tell them . . . if only to reach but a few.”
― James D. Maxon

“Words are the writer’s hocus-pocus, our dark arts and our deception. They’re our charm and our temptation. Sometimes the writer overindulges himself and it gets out of hand, but that’s how we like it, it’s how we’ve ghosted some of our best creations.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“She asked me "what is it about
these people -

the silent ones,
the thinking ones,
and the brooding ones


why do I get drawn
to them

without knowing them?

what is it about them?

is there a magnetic
force about them?

or do they cast a spell
on me?

what is it
about these people!

the misfits
the poets,
the writers,

the painters,
the singers,

the dancers,
the musicians,

and all the ones
who create art?

what is it
that pulls me
to them?

is it
their craft
their passion

their words
their thoughts

their loneliness.
their life?

what is it about
these people?"

And I smiled
and said "I will
search the answers
to your questions
in my loneliness.”
― Avijeet Das