Abhirupa Purkayastha – Simplifying Life

Inspiration. Nuggets of wisdom. Openers to let your bottled up creative juice flow.

1. “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”-  Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
2. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov
3. “Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
4. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” – Stephen King
5. “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway
6. “Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences” – Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
7. “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” – Philip José Farmer
8. “You can make anything by writing.” – C.S. Lewis
9. “A word after a word after a word is power.” – Margaret Atwood
10. “Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.” – Virginia Woolf
11. “Tears are words that need to be written.” – Paulo Coelho
12. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov
13. “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” – Jack London
14. “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” – William H. Gass, A Temple of Texts
15. “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” –  Anaïs Nin
16. “Write what should not be forgotten.” – Isabel Allende
17. “I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.” – James A. Michener
18. “Writing starts with living.” – L.L. Barkat, Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing
19. “A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.”- Robert Louis Stevenson
20. Humility is an essential quality in writers who want to write well.” – Margaret Jean Langstaff, Marlin, Darlin’: Garnet Sullivan Live from Florida #1
21. “My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.” – Judy Blume
22. “I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer: talent, luck, discipline. It can be in any combination, but there’s nothing you do to influence the first two. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”
    —Michael Chabon
23. “The best books come from someplace deep inside…. Become emotionally involved. If you don’t care about your characters, your readers won’t either.”- Judy Blume
24. “An inspirational writer’s life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.” – Shannon L. Alder
25. “The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or a new thing in an old way.” – Richard Harding Davis
26. “Stay humble as a writer: write on toilet paper.” – Jonas Eriksson
27. “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
28. “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” -Toni Morrison
29. “It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” – Vita Sackville-West
30. “Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” — Hunter S. Thompson
31. “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”—Virginia Woolf
32. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”—George Orwell
33. “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.” -Mark Twain
34. “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” -William Wordsworth
35. “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” -Lord Byron
36. “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.” – Paul Gallico
37. “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is … the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”—Mark Twain
38. “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.” -Agatha Christie
39. “It is said that you can’t write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can’t read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well…..problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.” – Richelle E. Goodrich
40. “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”- Jorge Luis Borges
41. “I confess I seldom commune with my conscience when I write.” – Anton Chekhov
42. “When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.”—Ernest Hemingway
43. “Write while the heat is in you. … The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”
    —Henry David Thoreau
44. “A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.” – W. Somerset Maugham, Summing Up, 1938
45. “If the desire to write is not accompanied by actual writing, then the desire must be not to write.” – Hugh Prather
46. “As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.” – Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894
47. “The paper is patient, but the reader is not.” – Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
48. “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.” – Ray Bradbury
49. “Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all.” – Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927
50. “The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.” – André Gide, Journals, 1894

These are just 50 of my favorite writing quotes. Yes, I have more to add to this list. What’s your favorite writing quote? Drop a comment and will add it to the list.