Quotes on Writing & Life

“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”

by Li-Young Lee

A great speech is literature.

by Peggy Noonan

Celebrate Your Writing

If there’s one thing we have to remember as writers, it’s that our work and ourselves are not the same thing.

• When you get a rejection note from an agent or magazine, they are not rejecting you.

• When your book fails to sell, it’s not because people dislike you.

• Even if you’re a terrible writer and no one ever reads you, you are probably still a decent, lovable human being who can make great changes in the world.

Why do we forget that so often? Celebrate your writing whether it reaches 10 or 10 million.

~ Book Fox

I am probably exaggerating a little, but I owe my equilibrium to ink and paper.

~ Julien Green

A story is a story, and one may glean from it what one likes. Good sense need not enter into it.

~ G. Willow Wilson

All you can do in this life is follow your dreams. Otherwise you're just wasting your time.

~ David Williams

Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.

~ Ma Jian

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

~ Phyllis A. Whitney

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

In books and in life, you need to read several pages before someone's true character is revealed.

~ Gail Carson Levine

Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.

~ Lynn Abbey

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

~ Will Self

Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.

~ Gwyneth Paltrow

Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot.

~ S.M. Stirling

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

~ Jackie Collins

Our greatest creation is your creative life. It's all in your hands.

~ Sara Zarr

Creativity requires a state of grace. So many things are required for it to succeed.

~ Magda Szabó

Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.

~ Clive James

Don't follow the crowd, let the crowd follow you.

~ Margaret Thatcher

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

~ Elmore Leonard

Unlike baked beans, loaves of breads or Fuji apples, books once consumed, do not disappear.

~ John Sutherland

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.

~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

~ Günter Grass