Writer Thoughts Quotes & Sayings

There have been many genocidal attempts, without and within, to destroy and/or misrepresent the histories, futures, languages, and traditional thoughts of Native peoples. But traditions, unlike doctrines, can persist and evolve at the same time. This anthology is a response to modern-day Native people becoming more and more disgruntled with spurious representations. Each writer has built a bridge between what has been "presented wrongly" and what needs to be "expressed accurately. — MariJo Moore

I'm not a writer, but I'm very good at editing. That's my specialty. I can read something and tell you everything that's wrong with it and what's great about it and what needs to change, but it's hard for me to organize my thoughts. — Tracy Pollan

I didn't know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book - that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I'm glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed. — Melissa Febos

I'm an alien in my own world, a writer without words, a musician without a piano, a magician without a wand. I am fooled by infinite words that rush in my blood, yet imprisoned by the very thoughts of silence. I'm a gray green fallow leaf on trees and abandoned on the streets, a never-ending spring season and an eternal autumn. I'm the golden of the sun and the silver of the moon, the fog of dawn and the amber of dusk. I'm the white and the red flag , the obedient and the rebel. I am the coward in the brave, and the child in the man. I am, but a writer. — Nema Al-Araby

Lemat's agent says to him: y duty to you, first and foremost, is make sure you have a career, a prosperous one. I know authors always want to pander to their more artistic leanings, but this is a business after all. You have to do something to pay the bills so you can keep on writing. If you wanted to be an author just for the sake of expressing your thoughts, you could have done that by staying self-published, am I correct? but that's not what you wanted. That's not why you penned Killing Jesus. You wanted to get out there and swim in a bigger pond, didn't you? Well, here you are. Welcome to the blooming ocean. — Henry Mosquera

Over-mastered by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them. — Philip Sidney

Today is your wright-time. Anything worth writing will be, or has been written already. A great story chooses its writer lest no wright should boast. Just write! If you don't, you will come right in contact with your thoughts someplace soon. — Amah Lambert

I write things down because my thoughts get too heavy in my head and it hurts my neck. — Joyce Rachelle

A character in a writer's head, unwritten,remains a possession; his thoughts recur to it constantly, and while his imagination gradually enriches it, he enjoys the singular pleasure of feeling that there, in his mind, someone is living a varied and tremulous life, obedient to his fancies. - W.Somerset Maugham — Chandana Roy

I don't have any particular rituals, I sometimes like to write in longhand when I'm searching for ideas but I do the vast majority by typing, I can't always keep up with my thoughts longhand. I'm not a coffee shop writer because I feel obliged to order more coffee and then I end up over-caffeinated. — Erin Morgenstern

I can shake off everything if I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn. But, and that is the greatest question, will I ever be able to write anything great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer? I hope so, oh, I hope so very much, for I can recapture everything when I write, my thoughts, my ideas and my fantasies. — Anne Frank

Thoughts don't have time and space, one need to hold them. The one who succeeds at them becomes a writer. — Santosh Avvannavar

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) — Martijn Benders

A writer needs solitude : moments that he can spend in introspection and in reflection. These moments make him pensive and thoughtful and help him write his thoughts with clarity. A life of devotion to one's passion gives us meaning to our life. — Avijeet Das

When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding. — Hermann Hesse

When sitting down to write a letter, it always pays to calm one's mood, collect one's thoughts, and have a plan. — Fennel Hudson

A writer tries to express those thoughts, which are inexpressible, with beauty and love. — Debasish Mridha

I reside in an abode where your thoughts imagine me... You reside in my heart where the auricles camouflage my longing... — Avijeet Das

I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn't try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I've always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I've never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood. — Jostein Gaarder

I am a deeply uncertain individual. I often find myself acting like a fool to make the people around me laugh. When they're laughing, they're not watching me quite as closely. I smile to put people at ease. But what if I opened my mouth one day, spoke my actual thoughts, and the people glared at my opinions? What if they thought me disgusting or frightening or ugly because of my words? Would you keep your lips shut for the rest of your life to not face that judgment? Just for the sake of someone else's comfort? For these strangers, who I will never know? If I can't speak then I'll write. These strangers, whose opinions crush me, will be forced to listen. Because when they read my words those words will make a home within their heads. They may even end up using my own opinions against me. But at least I'll be hidden behind the pages of a book. — F.K. Preston

But beyond that, really, stop trying to be good. People's definitions of "good" vary. What one person loves, another hates. So stop obsessing over being a good writer. It doesn't matter. Too many writers are caught up with insecure thoughts of whether they are any good. It's crazy. Enough with this neurotic behavior. Time to be confident in your craft. — Jeff Goins

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager - and even when you're older - lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer. — Jennifer Donnelly

David Foster Wallace is a big idol of mine. His writing is so clear that for years I'd read him and think, My God, he is actually writing the way I think. He's describing the thoughts in my head. And then I realized, No, wait. He's just such a good writer, so transparent and articulate, that when he describes his thoughts, I think they're my own. — Damian Kulash

Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book. — James Richardson

Whatever good and beautiful experience you are having, if you are not writing them down, you are wasting them! Your thoughts on the paper are your real reality because the realities of the experience quickly disappear, they are already gone, they are dead, but the written thoughts of your experiences are still alive and can live thousands of years! Sit down and write them down! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind. — George Henry Lewes

A writer has many tools: eyes, ears, nose, sensations, thoughts feelings and imagination. The tools can construct a house of stories. — Mark Rubinstein

With my simple writings I want to change the mindset of humanity so that they themselves can create a positive new world where they can live with dignity and peace. — Debasish Mridha

Writing is the light of imagination playing over shadow of thoughts. — Khaled Talib

A novel is the final common pathway of a writer's experiences, fears, wishes, thoughts, feelings & fantasies. All is distilled in a novel. — Mark Rubinstein

Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time — Julian Barnes

I wanted to say all these things about how you just have to hold on to the things you love and let go of all the rest. — Charlotte Eriksson

In the work of a writer of genius, we rediscover our own neglected thoughts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader. — Taylor Mali

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world. — Hilary Mantel

For Christians who desire to write, the call to read broadly is an absolute necessity, for writing is, in many ways, the process of digesting and synthesizing not only the thoughts and experiences of a writer's own life, but the writer's intellectual wanderings as well. — Gene C. Fant Jr.

If you want to become a concert pianist, do it every day. You want to be a writer, do it every day. You want to become depressed, think depressing thoughts every day. You want to become an optimist, think a cheerful thought every day. Do it every day. — Robert Anton Wilson

When you read a manuscript that has been damaged by water, fire, light or just the passing of the years, your eye needs to study not just the shape of the letters but other marks of production. The speed of the pen. The pressure of the hand on the page. Breaks and releases in the flow. You must relax. Think of nothing. Until you wake into a dream where you are at once a pen flying of vellum and the vellum itself with the touch of ink tickling your surface. Then you can read it. The intention of the writer, his thoughts, his hesitations, his longings and his meaning. You can read as clearly as if you were the very candlelight illuminating the page as the pen speeds over it. — Diane Setterfield

When writing a comprehensive self-investigatory scroll, the writer attempts to weave a network of strands capable of enmeshing all sizes of ideas including those with no obvious interconnection. The writer must also trace all lingering thoughts to their original source in personal experiences, and revaluate each exquisite nuance notched into a person's conscious mind including acts of depravity, violence, and the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace. — Kilroy J. Oldster

A writer's thoughts can act as an Aladdin's lamp, which can enlighten and open the mind of a reader, by showing opportunities and beauties of life. — Debasish Mridha

Any writer who puts his words and thoughts out into the public is going to be criticized. — Thomas Moore

Even today it's not uncommon to find teachers who believe that if a child can't take a pen in hand and write an essay on a piece of paper, then he or she is not really a writer. What the CCSS is telling us is that this isn't true. If a student can organize her thoughts in a meaningful way and dictate them into a machine or to another human being, she is a writer and should officially be recognized as such. — Sally A. Spencer

When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. Filling pages and people with inspiration. When my thoughts don't want to rest on a page, we argue. We argue that one merely is ready just too comfortable playing in The Nile [denial] river. So we compromise. We grow,
water metaphors
and plant simile trees
of golden-almond
manifested love dreams.
Then at that moment, we forgot what we were arguing about.
Beauty can do that for you.
That's the beauty of writing. — Antonia Perdu

Because there are a million thoughts that never sleep
and a million more that wake up as each second passes by ...
And it's insanity inside
but I can no longer keep quiet
Oh, I can't speak as well
I need to write
I have to write ... — Sanhita Baruah

A cheap writer has an expensive thoughts. — J. Limbu

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper. — Eugene Ionesco

Being a writer all boils down to this: It's you, in a chair, staring at a page. And you're either going to stay in that chair until words are written, or you're going to give up and walk away. The great writers have to fight for their words. They have to choose to write, choose words over distractions, and their characters over their friends. Great writers can be lonely, exhausted souls. But through our characters, we live. — Alessandra Torre

I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me. — Ian Anderson

Thoughts fly and words go on foot. Therein lies all the drama of a writer. — Julien Green

Every time I sit down to write, I need to commit to a word count goal, otherwise I waste too much time editing and re-editing my previous work, staring dreamily off into space, pretending that I'm thinking profound, poetic thoughts when really I'm just thinking, 'Look at me being a writer! I'm so happy I'm a writer!' — Liane Moriarty

As a fiction writer I am not always sure where reality ends and non reality begins, when sane thoughts become less than sane, or what is imagination versus undiscovered truth, but ultimately, it is my job to make you as unsure as I am. — Kathryn Mattingly

Reluctantly Bastian's thoughts turned back to reality. He was glad the Neverending Story had nothing to do with that.
He didn't like books in which dull, cranky writers describe humdrum events in the very humdrum lives of humdrum people. Reality gave him enough of that kind of thing, why should he read about it? Besides, he couldn't stand it when a writer tried to convince him of something. And these humdrum books, it seemed to him, were always trying to do just that.
Bastian liked books that were exciting or funny, or that made him dream. Books where made-up characters had marvelous adventures, books that made him imagine all sorts of things.
Because one thing he was good at, possibly the only thing, was imagining things so clearly that he almost saw and heard them. — Michael Ende

Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself. — Felix Dennis

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency. — Italo Calvino

The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands. — Herbert Spencer

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise. — Steven Pinker

The struggle for a life extracts all our attention, and leaves us blind, deaf, dumb and senseless. The writer, the artist, the musician vanishes, without even the charity of a proper cremation. At this point words become formless sounds, and thoughts run out of paper and jump out of the terra firma and fly in the air, forcing us to find someone to share them with, someone who could understand. The fear of wasting words is the worst kind of it, only a writer knows. — Anu Lal

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational. — David Small

The habit of committing our thoughts to writing is a powerful means of expanding the mind, and producing a logical and systematic arrangement of our views and opinions. It is this which gives the writer a vast superiority, as to the accuracy and extent of his conceptions, over the mere talker. No one can ever hope to know the principles of any art or science thoroughly who does not write as well as read upon the subject. — William Blaikie

Always write exactly what you're feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work ... make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it ... just put your heart and soul into all that you do ... then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel. -Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

Stories have their own kind of truth," I pointed out. "And there's not much story if you don't make things up. I mean, you can't be a writer and just write about real life."
"Why not?" Luke snapped a twig.
I was amazed he even had to ask. "Because real life's only bearable if you don't have to live in it all the time. — K.M. Grant

As a journalist you have to think quickly, you're exposed to all types of people and situations and you've got to synthesize your thoughts in a very clear and concise way and write them down quickly. Those were all things that have proven really useful in my life as a television writer. — Frank Spotnitz

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. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. — Henry David Thoreau

A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included. — Jarod Kintz

A writer creates from his mind; his creations emanate from the feelings enmeshed deep within his heart. From the fire burning within his soul, he gives shape to his thoughts. His thoughts start to breathe. Every sentence breathes with a purpose. — Avijeet Das

Names generate meaning in a short amount of space - they provoke thoughts, questions. That's something I like doing. Of course, you have to be careful. Sometimes it can alienate the reader, it can be another level of mediation, to make a character carry the great burden of a metaphoric name. The character can be a device before he or she becomes a person, and that can be a bad thing for a writer who wants to offer up a kind of emotional proximity in the work. It's a constant struggle, the desire to be playful and the desire to communicate on some very stark emotional level. — Joshua Ferris

Like a bird, my thoughts were flying away so I became a writer to cage my thoughts with paper and pen. You should not call me a writer but rather a catcher of thoughts. — Debasish Mridha

I've made two short films, both of which my father deemed "interesting but beside the point," and am so paralyzed as a writer that I've started translating poems from languages I don't speak, some kind of Surrealist exercise meant to inspire me but also prevent me from thinking the perverse, looping thoughts that come unbidden: I am hideous. — Lena Dunham

Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and behold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret become precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Write the words "The FIve Senses" on an index card and tack it to a bulletin board above your desk. You should have a bulletin board above your desk, if at all possible. Some place where you can tack images, quotes, postcards, scraps of thoughts and ideas that will help remind you of you you are and what you're doing. — Dani Shapiro

Reading books makes us more attentive to our personage and the aesthetic world that we live in. Writers that we idolize use language, logic, and nuance to paint physical and emotional scenes with refined precision. A writer's use of vivid language creates lingering aftereffects that work their wonder on the reader's malleable mind. A stirred mind resurrects our semiconscious memories; it causes us to summon up enduring images of our family, friends, and acquaintances. Just as importantly, inspirational writing makes us recognize our own telling character traits and identify our formerly unexpressed thoughts and feelings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I have walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it ... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. — Soren Kierkegaard

I maybe many things to many people; but for me I am a writer; always have been and always will be.
I may not contribute to great literatures, but my contribution to writing would be always there; etched in the minds of the people whose lives I have touched with words.
Only a writer can understand what it means to a writer to not be able to be one.
To have the nib of pen broken ... like a death sentence ..
Or a life imprisonment in one's own mind without an outlet to thoughts.
I would give up things I love the most if that's the choice I am given to be able to be what I really want to be - A writer.
(C) Arti Honrao — Arti Honrao

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel. — Mo Yan

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. — Lynne Truss

If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies. — Allan W. Eckert

In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. — Pico Iyer

Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I ... clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work. — Judith Barrington

How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?". — Shubham Choudhary

The virtue of a piece is the writer's thoughts. — Joan Acocella

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so. — Alain De Botton

Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

The fact is that in any open society people constantly say things that other people don't like. It's completely normal that should happen. And in any confident, free society you just shrug it off and you proceed. There is no way of creating a free society where nobody says anything that others don't like. If offendness is the point at which you have to limit your thoughts then nothing can be said. There might be people who might be offended by various kinds of literature. I myself, I am not very fond of, let me not mention Chetan Bhagat, I wasn't going to say that, so I have not. And yet, I believe such writer have a right to publish, and of course to live. The point is behind these ideas of offendness and respect there is always the threat of violence. Always the threat is if you do that which disrespect or offends me I will be violent to you and so the real subject is not religion, its violence. — Salman Rushdie

Books are portals for the imagination, whether one is reading or writing, and unless one is keeping a private journal, writing something that no one is likely to read is like trying to have a conversation when you're all alone. Readers extend and enhance the writer's created work, and they deepen the colors of it with their own imagination and life experiences. In a sense, there's a revision every time one's words are read by someone else, just as surely as there is whenever the writer edits. Nothing is finished or completely dead until both sides quit and it's no longer a part of anyone's thoughts. So it seems almost natural that a lifelong avid reader occasionally wants to construct a mindscape from scratch after wandering happily in those constructed by others. If writing is a collaborative communication between author and reader, then surely there's a time and a place other than writing reviews for readers to 'speak' in the human literary conversation. — P.J. O'Brien

I had depressing thoughts that the theme, even though I had thought of it, was better than I was as a writer. Henry James or Thomas Mann could easily write it, but not I. 'I'm thinking of writing it from the point of view of someone at the hotel who observes her,' I said, but this did not fill me with much hope. Then my friend, who is not a writer, suggested I try it from the omniscient author's point of view. — Patricia Highsmith

I write so the endangered thoughts roaming naked and vulnerable through the misty jungles of my mind aren't slain by the guns of practical living. — Kim Krizan

For a writer, it seems a help rather than a hindrance to be at least a little crazy. Who but a crazy person would carve out a very private, quiet place in the world, only to pour his/her innermost thoughts and emotions onto a page for the entire world to examine? Even in fiction, we give a map to our most secret feelings. Why do writers do it? Perhaps because we'd be crazier still if we didn't. — Leland Dirks

In such a person, sadness breeds purpose; finding inspiration in the darkness and often times, I believe, they will impress a hell onto their own lives in order to re-create it, that others might suffer the experience from the comfort of their armchairs. - Quote from Her Past's Present. — Michael Poeltl

If a writer rewrites an essay, people who read the new version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. — Paul Graham

To the Red Drum for sets, to hear Bird, whom I saw distinctly digging Mardou several times also myself directly into my eye looking to search if really I was that great writer I thought myself to be as if he knew my thoughts and ambitions or remembered me from other night clubs and other coasts, other Chicagos - not a challenging look but the king and founder of the bop generation at least the sound of it in digging his audience digging the eyes, the secret eyes him-watching, as he just pursed his lips and let great lungs and immortal fingers work, — Jack Kerouac

You are a dancer in this great stage we call life. Your imagination is the writer and thoughts are the director of the dance drama. So unleash your thoughts to dramatize your dance. — Debasish Mridha

If a pen can communicate our thoughts, dreams, and emotions and be the voice of our soul, then ink is the medium that carries the message. — Fennel Hudson

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway. — Anne Lamott

Ugh, writer's block. The best thing to do is to forget about everything you're trying to do. Get away from your writing station, kick your feet up and relax. Then allow your mind to just wander. Don't stop it. Just let yourself think of anything, no mater how silly the thoughts seem. Remember, not to judge these thoughts. This will open up your creative receptors. You'll begin to think outside the box. Then the good stuff will start racing through you. That's when you start writing! — La Tisha Honor

In the words of a great writer, we find our own neglected thoughts. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Wrestle with your thoughts until you get them on the page. Nobody can read them until you've written them down. — Peter James West

There is much asked and only so much I think I can or should answer, and so, in this post I would like to give a few thoughts on what seemed to be the overwhelming question: "WHY?"
And here is the best answer I can give: Because.
Because sometimes, life is damned unfair.
Because sometimes, we lose people we love and it hurts deeply.
Because sometimes, as the writer, you have to put your characters in harm's way and be willing to go there if it is the right thing for your book, even if it grieves you to do it.
Because sometimes there aren't really answers to our questions except for what we discover, the meaning we assign them over time.
Because acceptance is yet another of life's "here's a side of hurt" lessons and it is never truly acceptance unless it has cost us something to arrive there.
Why, you ask? Because, I answer.
Inadequate yet true. — Libba Bray

My principal failing as a writer is the lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk. — Vladimir Nabokov