Writing Quotes of the Day

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

“Writing is not competition to me. Writing is fun and I am simply a storyteller. What I really enjoy about writing is the self-discipline that it takes to do it. To me, it is a great challenge, like learning to celestial navigate or becoming a seaplane pilot. Any man or woman bellied up to a bar with a few shots of tequila swimming around in their bloodstream can tell a story. The challenge is to wake up the next day and carve through the minefield of the hangover and a million other excuses and be able to cohesively get it on paper.”—Jimmy Buffett

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done. The writer's only responsibility is to his art.”—William Faulkner

“I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.”—Anna Quindlen

“For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.”—George Orwell

“The writer who cares more about words than about story (characters, action, setting, atmosphere) is unlikely to create a vivid and continuous dream; he gets in his own way too much; in his poetic drunkenness, he can't tell the cart—and its cargo—from the horse.”—John Gardner

“Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”—Winston Churchill

“Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page. When people tell me I've kept them up all night, I feel like I've succeeded.”—Sidney Sheldon

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

“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's works is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”—John Steinbeck