Asimov kicks off yet another Writing Quotes

"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."

- Isaac Asimov

The following quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter...

"The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but we are unable to say."

- Anais Nin

"Every story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end...but not necessarily in that order."

- Jean-Luc Godard

"The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master - something that at times strangely wills and works for itself."

- Charlotte Brontë

Writing Quotes helps you to be good to yourself

The first quote I thought was written by somebody else, but Walter "Red" Smith apparently was the first person to have it directly attributed to him-

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

- Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

- Ray Bradbury

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

- Cyril Connolly

"I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

- Blaise Pascal

The above quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with."

- William Faulkner

Issac Bashevis Singer kicks off Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter...

"Originality is not seen in single words or even in sentences. Originality is the sum total of a man's thinking or his writing. "

- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."

- Francoise Sagan

"The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium."

- Norbet Platt

"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."

- Catherine Drinker Bowen

And let's finish this up with one from Mark Twain...

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

Rumi kicks off Writing Quotes

"The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep."

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there."

"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray."

“Only from the heart can you touch the sky.”

“Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent.”

- Rumi

And because she pointed the way to these quotes, one from...

"To write is to breathe."

- Beth Mende Conny

This quote came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter...

"Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them."

- Charles Caleb Colton

Writing Quotes for Post #500

Barring a false start here, and a yanked post there, this is Post #500. I couldn't have done it without you, the audience. Well, I mean, I could, but it would be boring all by myself and it would something other than blogging (insert your own joke about going blind -- here). At any rate, I thank those that comment and those that lurk. I also give thanks to those that give me the helpful slap on the back and those...well, I draw inspiration from both.

So, here is to everyone that has every visited this blog. Here is to all of you and for success to bless each and everyone. Sláinte!


These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter-

"Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions -- what we do -- that we are happy or the reverse...All human happiness and misery take the form of action."

- Aristotle

"In nearly all good fiction, the basic -- all but inescapable -- plot form is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition (perhaps including his own doubts), and so arrives at a win, lose, or draw."

- John Gardner

"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."

- Sylvia Plath

"The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it."

- Jules Renard

Frost, Heinlein, Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.


"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second."

- Robert Frost

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

- Robert Heinlein

"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can."

- Samuel Lover

The biggest Writing Quotes, ever*

The first is from Beth Mende Conny-

"Life is a book and you are its author. You detemine its plot and pace and you--only you--turn its pages."


The next ones are from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter-

"Ink and paper are sometimes passionate lovers, oftentimes brother and sister, and occasionally mortal enemies."

- Terri Guillemets

"I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it."

- Ernest Hemingway

"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself -- it is the occurring which is difficult."

- Stephen Leacock

"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."

- Karl Krauss

"Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will."

- Goethe

"I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head."

- John Updike

*Only because I haven't been posting them.

I was wrong, there will be another Writing Quote from Michener

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

- Truman Capote

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

- James Michener

Good Writing Quotes from...?

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won't just flow."

- Benjamin Cavell

"No one is asking, let alone demanding, that you write. The world is not waiting with bated breath for your article or book. Whether or not you get a single word on paper, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the universe will expand. Writing is forever and always a choice -- your choice."

- Beth Mende Conny

Borges and Doctorow for Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative."

- E.L. Doctorow

Capote...WTF? And other Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."

- Truman Capote

"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."

- William Faulkner

"When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence."

- Samuel Butler

"Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we?"

- Terri Guillemets

And...

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.

-Anne Morrow Lindbergh, via Chris.

F. Scott Fitzgerald kicks off Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."

-Elizabeth Drew

Neil Gaiman kicks off Writing Quotes

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

- Neil Gaiman

"Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it."

- PD James

Writing quotes, courtesy "Biloxi Blues"

Eugene Jerome: Why is that we come from the same background, but I can't understand you?

Arnold Epstein: You're a witness. You're always standing around watching what's happening, scribbling in your book what other people do. You have to get in the middle of it. You have to take sides. Make a contribution to the fight.

Eugene Jerome: What fight?

Arnold Epstein: Any fight. The one you believe in. Until you do, you will never be a writer, Eugene.

Later in the film...

Arnold (to Eugene): Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity.

Writing Quotes and I don't see eye to eye, with James Baldwin

These quotes came from The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

"One writes out of one thing only -- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give."

- James Baldwin

I politely disagree. One writes based on one's own experience, but a good or great writer won't limit themselves to their own experiences only. If you see things from only your point of view as a writer, well...

The folks at Creative Screenwriting rightly added this quote right after, to serve as a counter-point-

"The good writer seems to be writing about himself, but has his eye always on that thread of the Universe which runs through himself and all things."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing Quotes From Screaming Lord Byron And Meself

"But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."

-Lord Byron

From The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter

It's easier to destroy, than it is to design, construct and finish.

-Cormac Brown

BTW, I have a Cafepress shop where my slogans are better articulated.

Writing Quotes, Barton Fink Edition

I'm a writer, you monsters, I create! I create for a living, I'm a creator! I am a creator! (points at head) This, this is my uniform! This is how I service common man!

-Barton Fink, from the eponymous movie

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."

- Ernest Hemingway

"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile...a stain upon the silence."

- Samuel Beckett

From the Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

Ring in the New Year with writing quotes

"The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium."

- Norbet Platt

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

- William Wordsworth

From the Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter.

I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

-Thomas Edison

Writing Quotes, Burned-out Holiday Edition

Yeah, my sentiments exactly. While I'm burned out after a particularly taxing writing project, that just might be one of the best things that I've ever written, I need to find new inspiration. And hey, most importantly, so do you!

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

-Ernest Hemingway

From The Creative Screenwriting Magazine's Weekly Newsletter

Last, but not least, a good friend of mine reminds us of why we even bother...

We do what we have to do so that we may do what we want to do.

-John Donald Carlucci

Asimov and Wharton for Writing Quote Time

"A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness."
- Edith Wharton


"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success...but only if you persist."
- Isaac Asimov

From The Creative Screenwriting Weekly Newsletter