Writing is Heaven

WRITING IS HEAVEN

Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Thomas Berger

One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.
Steven Brust

The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain.
George Buchanan

Every word written is a victory against death.
Michel Butor

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

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.
Jack Dann

Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.
Monica Dickens

Writing counts.
Allyson Dickey

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write.
James T. Farrell

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are many reasons why novelists write – but they all have one thing in common: a need to create an alternative world.
John Fowles

Forget all the rules. Forget about being published. Write for yourself and celebrate writing.
Melinda Haynes

Writing wasn't easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It's wonderful!
Virpi Hämeen-Anttila


There is more pleasure to building castles in the air than on the ground.
Edward Gibbon
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver

No one is able to enjoy such feast than the one who throws a party in his own mind.
Selma Lagerlöf

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.
Anne Lamott

Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity.
Natalia Laurila

My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
John D. MacDonald

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.
Jules Renard

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it.
Leo Rosten

Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Susan Sontag

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Gloria Steinem

Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.
J. Michael Straczynski

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead .. another.
Brenda Ueland

I can't help but to write, I have a inner need for it. If I'm not in the middle of some literary project, I'm utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.
Kaari Utrio

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola

Writing is only boring to the people who are boring themselves.
Unknown