9 Quotes on Writing by Writers

1. There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

– Haruki Murakami 

2. Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty … like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

–Daphne du Maurier 

3. All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

–Leo Tolstoy 

4. An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

–Charles Dickens 

5. The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart. 

– Maya Angelou 

6. So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won’t come out that way – it’ll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don’t really control that.

– Keren Ann 

7. Writing down thoughts is like making marks in the wind. The wind in turn makes kites fly even as we cannot see the strings. 

–Nicoletta Baumeister 

8. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the music the words make. 

–Truman Capote 

9. There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. 

–Raymond Chandler

This listicle is part of ‘Friday Listicles‘, a weekly feature that professes our love for anything that is presented in a numbered or bulleted form, paving the way for a happy weekend.