Writer quotes

Quotes by writers, some about writing, and some about books (and writing).

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”  ~Neil Gaiman

“It doesn’t matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.” ~Jo Walton (Among Others)

“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” ~John Green

“So often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to say, and so often one regrets having marred it.”  ~Harold Acton, Memoirs of an Aesthete, 1948

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”  ~Anaïs Nin

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”  ~Ray Bradbury

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”  ~E.L. Doctorow

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”  ~Charles Peguy

“And by the way, 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

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”  ~Richard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”  ~Elmore Leonard

“If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  ~Toni Morrison

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