"The most important thing for a Christian writer to do, in my opinion, is to keep the Lord their primary focus. Pray about your writing. Pray with an attitude of absolute surrender . . . no strings attached. Hard as it is, I still try not to focus on the publishing. The goal of life is to complete the work God gave me to do, whatever that may be, and of pleasing Him. We cannot know until it happens if we will ever see our books in print, just as we cannot know anything about our futures. Life isn’t about being published. It’s about obeying Jesus Christ."
~Unknown~
Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
- Hermann Hesse
"Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head." ~ From the movie Finding Forrester
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. ~William Wordsworth
"God has plans for your writing. And believe me, they're better than any plans you have for yourself. Let HIM be in charge and let HIM delight you with what HE has in store."
~Virginia Smith
"We must not lose hope. Hope is an anchor to the souls of man. Satan would have us cast away that anchor. In this way he can bring discouragement and surrender. But we must not lose hope. The Lord is pleased with every effort, even the tiny, daily ones in which we strive to be more like Him. Though we may see that we have far to go on the road to perfection, we must never give up hope."
~Ezra Taft Benson
"Writing is an act of self-cherishing. We often write most deeply and happily on those areas closest to our hearts. Valuing our experience is not narcissism. It is not endless self-involvement. It is, rather, the act of paying active witness to ourselves and to our world. Such witness is an act of dignity, an act that recognizes that life is essentially a sacred transaction of which we know only the shadow, not the shape." ~ Julia Cameron, The Right to Write
"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it." ~Anais Nin
"Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own."
~Carol Burnett
"I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world." ~Mother Teresa
"There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed." ~Sophy Burnham
Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow . . .
~Lawrence Clark Powell
Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” ~E.L. Doctorow
The pen is the tongue of the mind." ~Miguel de Cervantes
Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear-and devils, too ~Graycie Harmon
"Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person." ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."
~Alice Walker
" But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think."
~Lord Byron
"If writers stopped writing about what happened to them, then there would be a lot of empty pages."
~Elaine Liner
"Creativity is God energy flowing through us, shaped by us, like light flowing through a crystal prism."
~Julia Cameron, TheArtist's Way
"Be yourself. Above all, let who you are, what you are, what you believe, shine through every sentence you write, every piece you finish."
~John Jakes
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. ~Vladimir Nabakov
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself”
~Truman Capote
"It only takes one person to change your life – you."
~Ruth Casey
"Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us."
~Susan Wittig Albert
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
~Einstein
"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
"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any." ~Orson Scott Card
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." ~
Cyril Connolly
The more you trust and rely upon the spirit, the greater your capacity to create. ~Dieter F. Uchtdorf
"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
"Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write."
~Rainer Maria Rilke
"Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such." ~Samuel Butler
"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."
~James Michener
"Everething that doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. And later on you can use it in some story."
~Tapani Bagge
"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
"The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home."
~John W. Campbell
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke."
~Arthur Polotnik
"A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head."
~Ethel Wilson
"A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes."
~William Sansom
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist, you are learning your craft- then you can add all the genius you like."
~Phyllis Whitney
"Ink on paper is as beautiful to me as flowers on the mountains; God composes, why shouldn't we?"
~Audra Foveo-Alba
What no wife (or husband!) of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.
~Burton Rascoe
To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.
~Truman Capote, McCall's, November 1967
"One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel."
~John Gardner
"I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating."
~Poul Anderson
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing."
~Bonnie Friedman
"It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly."
~C. J. Cherryh
"It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does."
~William Faulkner
"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die." ~Isaac Asimov
"I . . . have to constantly balance "being a writer" with being a wife and mother. It's a matter of putting two different things first, simultaneously."
~Madeleine L'Engle
"I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.' "
~Saul Bellow
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." ~Bill Cosby
"Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world." ~Tom Clancy
"When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color." ~Anais Nin
"The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them." ~Raymond Chandler
"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." ~Jack London
"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." ~E.L. Doctorow
"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." ~E.L. Doctorow
"Perseverance is more important than talent. The world is full of talented men and women who never achieve anything." ~(not sure who said it, but I like it!)
"Stop thinking about everyone else. Think about you. What do you want? What are your dreams? When you get to the end of your life and you're looking back on all you accomplished and didn't accomplish, what are the regrets you're going to have? Now live so that you don't carry those regrets." ~Tristi Pinkston
"In my experience, the best creative work is never done when one is unhappy." ~Albert Einstein
"Writing a book is a adventure. To begin with it is a toy and 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 out to the public." ~Winston Churchill
"Sure, it's simple, writing for kids… Just as simple as bringing them up." ~Ursula K. LeGuin
"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you." ~Z.N. Hurston
"Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."
~Neil Gaiman
"Detail makes the difference between boring and terrific writing. It’s the difference between a pencil sketch and a lush oil painting. As a writer, words are your paint. Use all the colors." ~Rhys Alexander
Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov
