Quotes on Words/Writing

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.


((This is here so we can prove it wrong!!!!))

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Keep writing. Keep doing it and doing it. Even in the moments when it's so hurtful to think about writing.

It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.

I write because I'm afraid to say some things out loud.

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

“I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself.”

-J. K. Rowling

Being an author is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.


((I substitute the word "wife" with other ones such as "parent" or "husband" or other things along those lines.))

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

Writers are just people who have a whole lot on the inside that they need to get to the outside, with pen and paper as their preferred method of transport. Same with dancers, artists, and singers - all the same urges with differing transportation.

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

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.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

...even though Sally Michaels only lives on paper, I live in the real world. And I can never forgive you for using me as raw material to create a fictional monster. Sally Michaels is my own personal ghost, a shadow hanging over each phone call, a cup of tea. And one cold day when age has robbed your mind of its fertile phrases and your hand of its dexterity all the success won't be able to shield you from the pain you've caused and the shame you deserve.
Or something like that.


(This could work in multiple places - I just want to put it here as a reminder of what could happen if we put real people in our stories and twist them...like I do much too often. -sigh-))