In the world of literature, words have the power to inspire, provoke thought, and transform lives. Writers, with their unique perspectives and eloquent expressions, have a remarkable ability to capture the human experience in just a few lines. Whether you're seeking motivation, a fresh perspective, or a spark of creativity, the wisdom of writers often offers just what we need. In this curated collection of 129 inspirational quotes from writers, explore timeless insights that continue to resonate across generations. Let these quotes inspire you to dream big, embrace challenges, and celebrate the beauty of the written word.
1. “It is related that Sakyamuni [the historical Buddha] once dismissed as of small consequence a feat of levitation on the part of a disciple, and cried out in pity for a yogin by the river who had spent twenty years of his human existence learning to walk on water, when the ferryman might have taken him across for a small coin.” - Peter Matthiessen
2. “Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.” - Oscar Wilde
3. “A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.” - Karl Kraus
4. “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” - Carl Sagan
5. “You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.” - Anne Lamott
6. “He was a writer and words were his weapons.” - Christopher Moore
7. “The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging. ” - Virginia Woolf
8. “Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.” - Anne Fadiman
9. “We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.” - Dorianne Laux
10. “You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.” - Dorianne Laux
11. “Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. ” - Christian Bauman
12. “It's rather disconcerting to sit around a table in a critique of someone else's work, only to realize that the antagonist in the story is none other than yourself, and no one present thinks you're a very likable character.” - Michelle Richmond
13. “To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you. ” - Michelle Richmond
14. “Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.” - Adam Johnson
15. “The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.” - Adam Johnson
16. “A writer, like a sheriff, is the embodiment of a group of people and without their support both are in a tight spot.” - Craig Johnson
17. “I am not a slow writer, I am not a fast writer . . . I am a half-fast writer.” - Robert Asprin
18. “I fix the cramped, lined pageswith my curious stare. How do youcome to exist?” - Kiera Woodhull
19. “To make this world a whole lot brighter,when I grow up I'll be a writer.” - Lee Bennett Hopkins
20. “Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.” - Amy Lowell
21. “Language is the source of misunderstandings.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
22. “There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.” - Tobias Wolff
23. “For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.” - Cao Yu
24. “Sometimes writing everyday is like pulling teeth, painful, but necessary.” - Wendy Swore
25. “A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.” - Jack Kerouac
26. “You see, unlike most writers today, I do not use a computer. I write the old-fashioned way: on the walls of caves.” - Cuthbert Soup
27. “As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.” - John Green
28. “A writer should not run around with a mirror for his countrymen; he should tell his society and his times things no one ever thought before.” - Stanisław Lem
29. “I dont write books so that you can be fascinated with me. I write them so you can be fascinated with YOU!” - Steve Maraboli
30. “There are... otherwise quite decent people who are so dull of nature that they believe that they must attribute the swift flight of fancy to some illness of the psyche, and thus it happens that this or that writer is said to create not other than while imbibing intoxicating drink or that his fantasies are the result of overexcited nerves and resulting fever. But who can fail to know that, while a state of psychical excitement caused by the one or other stimulant may indeed generate some lucky and brilliant ideas, it can never produce a well-founded, substantial work of art that requires the utmost presence of mind.” - E.T.A. Hoffmann
31. “But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.” - Anne Lamott
32. “The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” - Marge Piercy
33. “It's strange, isn't it. You stand in the middle of a library and go 'aaaaagghhhh' and everyone just stares at you. But you do the same thing on an aeroplane, and everyone joins in.” - Tommy Cooper
34. “Jika ingin menjadi seorang penulis pertama sekali kena membaca, kedua kena membaca, ketiga, membaca, keempat membaca dan kelima baru menulis.” - A. Samad Said
35. “I write books, bitch!” - Junnita Jackson
36. “Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art."(Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times.)” - Charles Dickens
37. “Well, Betsy," he said, "your mother tells me that you are going to use Uncle Keith's trunk for a desk. That's fine. You need a desk. I've often noticed how much you like to write. The way you eat up those advertising tablets from the store! I never saw anything like it. I can't understand it though. I never write anything but checks myself. ""Bob!" said Mrs. Ray. "You wrote the most wonderful letters to me before we were married. I still have them, a big bundle of them. Every time I clean house I read them over and cry.""Cry, eh?" said Mr. Ray, grinning. "In spite of what your mother says, Betsy, if you have any talent for writing, it comes from family. Her brother Keith was mighty talented, and maybe you are too. Maybe you're going to be a writer."Betsy was silent, agreeably abashed."But if you're going to be a writer," he went on, "you've got to read. Good books. Great books. The classics.” - Maud Hart Lovelace
38. “Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels.” - Maud Hart Lovelace
39. “Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.” - T.F. Hodge
40. “The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” - Jaron Lanier
41. “Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding.But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same.Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.” - Chitralekha Paul
42. “My lips are fierce with passion. My heart spins fiery beats. A rhythm lives within my fingers and dances in my feet.” - Jamie Weise
43. “Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not.” - Jamie Weise
44. “An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.” - Shannon Alder
45. “Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.” - Criss Jami
46. “If you live with dogs, you'll never run out of things to write about.” - Sharon Delarose
47. “...Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times... ...Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on... Quote on the Title Page of "Love TORN Asunder” - Elizabeth Funderbirk
48. “Miss, I'd gladly pay you to remove your clothes.” - David Scheier
49. “A professional man of letters, especially if he is much at war with unscrupulous enenemies, is naturally jealous of his privacy... so it was, I think, with Dryden.” - Raleigh, Sir Walter
50. “As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers, so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.” - Cyril Connolly
51. “The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.” - Alaa Al Aswany
52. “No book can be written till it wants to be written, till it shouts to be written, and raises up a persistent din in the writer's head. And then, if you want peace, you just have to pull it out and freeze it in print. Nothing less would do.” - Jyoti Arora
53. “12.Se escrevo o que sinto é porque assim diminuo a febre de sentir. O que confesso não tem importância, pois nada tem importânciaPor: Bernado SoaresIn: Livro do Desassossego” - Fernando Pessoa
54. “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
55. “Naturally, this country can't stand truth.” - Lewis H. Michaux
56. “A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run” - Channing Pollock
57. “All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.” - Stephanie Lennox
58. “A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.” - Margaret Atwood
59. “Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P's.” - Kristin Cashore
60. “A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.” - Leo Tolstoy
61. “No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer.” - Mehmet Murat ildan
62. “A writer should show the silver in his hands neither as bronze nor as gold; the gist of the matter is to show silver as silver.” - Mehmet Murat ildan
63. “You cannot teach creativity—how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.” Mario Vargas Llosa” - Mario Vargas Llosa
64. “I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living.” - Kim Krizan
65. “A friend worth knowing tolerates your flaws while a friend worth keeping loves you in spite of them.” - Kathy Reinhart
66. “Writing nonfiction means I tell people's stories for them, not because they're special but because we all are.” - Jo Deurbrouck
67. “If Laura was so prolific with poems, and in truth she was, then what was the problem with Megan’s request? Couldn’t Laura, with a little doing, keep stringing together line after line of words and construct, in time, a novel? It seemed logical, but there was the matter of finding an idea and sustaining it. Only fire could do that. The fire of rebellion.Mario Vargas Llosa had not used the term “fire” exactly, but rather had discussed the presence of “seditious roots” that could “dynamite the world” the writer inhabited. He claimed that writing stories was an exercise in freedom and quarreling—out-and-out rebellion, whether or not the writer was conscious of it. And this rebellion, Vargas Llosa reminded his readers, was why the Spanish Inquisition had strictly censored works of fiction, prohibiting them for three hundred years in the American colonies.” - L.L. Barkat
68. “In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing.” - R.M. Engelhardt
69. “During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making 150 wedding invitations by hand and was not for one instance of that time tempted to eat or look at my watch. By contrast, if seated at the computer, I check my email conservatively 30,000 times a day. When I am writing, I must have a snack, call a friend, or abuse myself every ten minutes. I used to think that this was nothing more than the difference between those things we do for love and those we do for money. But that can't be the whole story. I didn't always write for a living, and even back when it was my most fondly held dream to one day be able to do so, writing was always difficult. Writing is like pulling teeth. From my dick.” - David Rakoff
70. “I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer.” - Nema Al-Araby
71. “...when you're a writer, you become deeper and more uniquely distinct, the more you go inside yourself...” - John Geddes
72. “As a writer, you must truly possess a love for words.""Yes, that's right," I agreed."I've noticed that some authors favor particular words, making frequent use of them. Do you have a favorite?"I nodded assuredly and shared my answer. "BECAUSE."My interviewer looked surprised, as though he'd expected an impressive adjective or some rare verb. "That's your favorite word? Why?"I tried not to smirk. "Because.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
73. “I am so happy that I made someone cry today - don't worry I'm a writer. It's when they make me cry that it's a problem.” - Tina Smith
74. “Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.” - Victor J. Banis
75. “Writing consist of everything. whether your writing is of riddles, rimes, prose, trivial, general, of thought, or of feeling. indiscretions you've done or have fantasized about. love, deception, romance, fear, death, life, pain, & yes even happiness. writing is of a specific purpose & states a meaning within what is written.” - Michael Stuckey
76. “I write because I love it, not because I excel at it. But because I write, I shall slowly excel at it.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
77. “You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” - Paul Simon
78. “I write because I am a writer, not because I want to get anything out of it.” - H Raven Rose
79. “Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized.” - Thomas Moore
80. “The best part about being a writer is getting the last word.” - Shannon L. Alder
81. “And so I just kept writing to myself.” - Kimberly Novosel
82. “It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.” - Cornell Woolrich
83. “I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth.” - Cornell Woolrich
84. “The serious writer was aware of a paradox at the heart of his art: his inner world, the place of the strongest stories, was infinite, but it was also embedded in – if this was possible! – an even more infinite universe of all things to write about. It was like seeing the Grand Canyon from outer space – a huge gorge that looked like a thin trickle, impossible to miss, hard to hit.” - Marcus Speh
85. “The greatest artists express their inner self; an artist paints her rage; a writer pens his fear; a dancer expresses her sadness through movement; and a musician's loneliness echoes in his performance.” - Gerard de Marigny
86. “Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You’re giving a gift. You’re helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They’ll become real.” - James Chartrand
87. “Sometimes you can write about a character's day in under a minute and sometimes it takes a day just to write about a minute.” - Jennifer v Clancy
88. “Whatever you may have heard, self-publishing is not a short cut to anything. Except maybe insanity. Self-publishing, like every other kind of publishing, is hard work. You don’t wake up one morning good at it. You have to work for that.” - Zoe Winters
89. “A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.” - Roman Payne
90. “You can be a member of all of the romance writers associations, take part in all of the networking available, or win the latest romance award... but guess what? None of that makes a difference if you don't WRITE something people want to READ. The greatest editor in the world won't make your book a best seller if it isn't something people care about. So forget all of the fluff that clouds your purpose... writing!!” - Kathryn Le Veque
91. “I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To use a painfully precious metaphor, I need fixed stars to navigate by, otherwise I get lost in the blankness of the page.” - Lev Grossman
92. “I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced” - Agatha Christie
93. “...authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...” - John Geddes
94. “...what makes a writer a prophet is his ability to speak truth...” - John Geddes
95. “...you can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one..” - John Geddes
96. “A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.” - Alain De Botton
97. “I am a writer, I'm supposed to be intense and emotional,” - Natasha Duncan-Drake
98. “...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...” - John Geddes
99. “...perhaps in actions I'm less of a man - but, oh the words - such lovely words...” - John Geddes
100. “A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.” - W. Somerset Maugham
101. “You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, 'This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer.” - David Morrell
102. “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
103. “I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.” - Joan Didion
104. “On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.” - Annie Dillard
105. “Don't quit. It's very easy to quit during the first 10 years. Nobody cares whether you write or not, and it's very hard to write when nobody cares one way or the other. You can't get fired if you don't write, and most of the time you don't get rewarded if you do. But don't quit.” - Andre Dubus
106. “Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.” - Ben Hecht
107. “Being goal-oriented instead of self-oriented is crucial. I know so many people who want to be writers. But let me tell you, they really don't want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print. They don't want to go through the work of getting the damn book out. There is a huge difference.” - James Michener
108. “It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.” - Flannery O'Connor
109. “A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.” - John Steinbeck
110. “A novelist's characters must be with him as he lies down to sleep, and as he wakes from his dreams. He must learn to hate them and to love them.” - Anthony Trollopel
111. “Life's too short, drive it like ya stole it!” - Debra L. Hartmann
112. “The viewpoint character in each story is usually someone trapped in a living nightmare, but this doesn't guarantee that we and the protagonist are at one. In fact Woolrich often makes us pull away from the person at the center of the storm, splitting our reaction in two, stripping his protagonist of moral authority, denying us the luxury of unequivocal identification, drawing characters so psychologically warped and sometimes so despicable that a part of us wants to see them suffer. Woolrich also denies us the luxury of total disidentification with all sorts of sociopaths, especially those who wear badges. His Noir Cop tales are crammed with acts of police sadism, casually committed or at least endorsed by the detective protagonist. These monstrosities are explicitly condemned almost never and the moral outrage we feel has no internal support in the stories except the objective horror of what is shown, so that one might almost believe that a part of Woolrich wants us to enjoy the spectacles. If so, it's yet another instance of how his most powerful novels and stories are divided against themselves so as to evoke in us a divided response that mirrors his own self-division.("Introduction")” - Francis M. Nevins
113. “Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god. ” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo
114. “It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.” - Isaac Asimov
115. “Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.” - Fabrizio De André
116. “I have yet to find that one perfect phrase that epitomizes all the mysteries of the universe. Luckily, I doubt to ever pen it in this lifetime, for then the seeking ends; miserable is the day the adventure ends.” - D.A. Botta
117. “It is an awesome tragedy in this life that, when asking what a person is and they reply doctor or lawyer or engineer, we don't say "Well thats a nice little hobby, but why don't you take up writing or painting or music?” - D.A. Botta
118. “To write what you think is to think what you write. Leave those of hollow to their dust. They are but sorry things.” - D.A. Botta
119. “Ideally, love is unconditional; practically, it is more often the opposite.” - T.F. Hodge
120. “The highest privilege of being a writer is being able to say, 'open your mind to me and I'll take you to another world.” - Alexei Maxim Russell
121. “The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.” - David Mitchell
122. “Don't say you're a writer if you're not writing. Even if you're writing, don't call yourself a writer. Say instead, 'I write.' It's the verb that's important, not the noun.” - Patti Digh
123. “Sento ancora la follia scorrermi dentro, ma ancora non ho scritto le parole che avrei voluto, la tigre mi è rimasta sulla schiena. Morirò con addosso quella figlia di puttana, ma almeno le ho dato battaglia. E se fra voi c'è qualcuno che si sente abbastanza matto da voler diventare scrittore, gli consiglio va' avanti, sputa in un occhio al sole, schiaccia quei tasti, è la migliore pazzia che possa esserci, i secoli chiedono aiuto, la specie aspira spasmodicamente alla luce, e all'azzardo e alle risate. Regalateglieli. Ci sono abbastanza parole per noi tutti.” - Charles Bukowski
124. “I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.” - Shay Youngblood
125. “My wish has always been to write my own story, to create a life that’s worth writing about. But is a story worth anything at all if I have no one to tell it to?” - Charlotte Eriksson
126. “I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed out my words. I want to get all fucked up and write raw and ugly about all these things I see and am and could be.” - Charlotte Eriksson
127. “I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem.Watch me burn.Love always, Charlotte” - Charlotte Eriksson
128. “...she (the artist, the writer) doesn't wait for inspiration, she acts in the anticipation of its apparition.” - Steven Pressfield
129. “The artist must be like that Marine. He has to know how to be miserable. He has to love being miserable.” - Steven Pressfield
