Write Quotes

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett

“I only want to write. And there's no college for that except life.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“I write to find strength.
I write to become the person that hides inside me.
I write to light the way through the darkness for others.
I write to be seen and heard.
I write to be near those I love.
I write by accident, promptings, purposefully and anywhere there is paper.
I write because my heart speaks a different language that someone needs to hear.
I write past the embarrassment of exposure.
I write because hypocrisy doesn’t need answers, rather it needs questions to heal.
I write myself out of nightmares.
I write because I am nostalgic, romantic and demand happy endings.
I write to remember.
I write knowing conversations don’t always take place.
I write because speaking can’t be reread.
I write to sooth a mind that races.
I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in the sand.
I write because my emotions belong to the moon; high tide, low tide.
I write knowing I will fall on my words, but no one will say it was for very long.
I write because I want to paint the world the way I see love should be.
I write to provide a legacy.
I write to make sense out of senselessness.
I write knowing I will be killed by my own words, stabbed by critics, crucified by both misunderstanding and understanding.
I write for the haters, the lovers, the lonely, the brokenhearted and the dreamers.
I write because one day someone will tell me that my emotions were not a waste of time.
I write because God loves stories.
I write because one day I will be gone, but what I believed and felt will live on.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
― Arthur Miller

“I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.
And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.”
― Alysha Speer

“In the light, we read the inventions of others; in the darkness we invent our own stories. ”
― Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night

“When I write, I make discoveries about my feelings.”
― Gail Carson Levine, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly

“Writers write while dreamers procastinate. ”
― Besa Kosova

“Reading poetry is like undressing before a bath. You don't undress out of fear that your clothes will become wet. You undress because you want the water to touch you. You want to completely immerse yourself in the feeling of the water and to emerge anew.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down. I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure, I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later.”
― Richard Siken

“I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.”
― Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved

“We want life to make sense. If we don’t find meaning and orientation, we are bound to fabulate a living and invent an inspiring life story. When we write out a chosen script, we’ll have to make time to hunker down into attuning it to the hitches of the road map, time and again, with fractious patience. ( "Everybody his story" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Love is illiterate. Whether we write it big or small, we cannot read it. We might only guess. ( "I seek you" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I am the perfect version of me.”
― Besa Kosova

“I am in awe of flowers.
Not because of their colors,
but because even though they
have dirt in their roots,
they still grow.
They still bloom.”
― D. Antoinette Foy

“That's what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I'm not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Question like a child, reason like an adult, and write like a sage.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.”
― Paula Danziger

“To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you. ”
― Michelle Richmond

“I wasn't born to cook or clean,
but to read and write,
if you don't like me the way I am,
then go fly a kite.”
― Besa Kosova

“Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I have an impulse to write all over the orange walls- I need an alphabet of endings ripped out of books, of hands pulled off of clocks, of cold stones, of shoes filled with nothing but wind.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“That's what we storytellers do. We restore order with imagination. We instill hope again and again and again.”
― Kelly Marcel & Sue Smith

“I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.”
― S. E. Hinton

“Like a flower pressed flat and dried, we try to hold it still and say, this is exactly how it was the day I first saw it. But like the flower, the past cannot be trapped that way. It loses its fragrance and and its vitality, its fragility becomes brittleness and its colors fade. And when next you look on the flower, you know that it is not at all what you sought to capture, that that moment has fled forever.”
― Robin Hobb, Fool's Errand