I'm an English major and a total geek for anything bound in a book, so I'm a little bit biased- but I think there's a little writer living in everybody's soul, aching to get out, to express. I think writing fixes everything and has the power to change and and excite and inspire. Here are 15 quotes from authors who agree with me.
Write to feel.
"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." — Anaïs Nin
"Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for." — Ray Bradbury
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” ― Aldous Huxley
Write to experience.
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin
“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.” — Lloyd Alexander
Write to escape.
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” ― Ray Bradbury
“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” ― E.L. Doctorow
“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” ― Albert Camus
Write to create.
"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
"If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison
“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.” ― William H. Gass
Write because it's the closest thing to magic that we have left.
“If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.” ― Ray Bradbury
“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.” — Carl Sagan
