Quotes about Writing

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.

I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is.

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!

It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because i have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I -nor for that matter anyone else- will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen year old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie burried deep in my heart.

Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl

I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the 'Secret Annex' are humorous, there's a lot in my diary that speaks, but whether I have real talent remains to be seen.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I've learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do-- you can either type or kill yourself.