Writing Quotes

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

This is pretty much what journals are all about, at least to me. I knew as I wrote them that even though they provided an excellent place for brain (and heart, and psyche) dump, they were mainly a map of me.

The key to non-anxious sermon-writing is that it’s not about me. It’s about the congregation. I honor the fact that the listeners bring more to the sermon than I do. I remind myself of the hundreds of times someone says, 'I loved how you said…' and then tell me things that they heard that were nowhere in my text and that I never said. But they heard what they needed to hear.

Be generous, be delicate, and always pursue the prize.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

See things as they are and write about them. Don’t waste your creative energy trying to make things up. Even if you are writing fiction, write the things you see and know.

If you want to write you must have faith in yourself. Faith enough to believe that if a thing is true about you, it is likely true about many people. And if you can have faith in your integrity and your motives, then you can write about yourself without fear.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Writing well means never having to say, 'I guess you had to be there.'

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair–the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

You must not come lightly to the blank page.

If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

I never feel that I have comprehended an emotion, or fully lived even the smallest events, until I have reflected upon it in my journal; my pen is my truest confidant, holding in check the passions and disappointments that I dare not share even with my beloved.

Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.