Quotes & Sayings About Writing A Love Story

Love writes without words. — A.D. Posey

You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind. — Billy Bob Thornton

I love writing, and I love the solitude of the writing, in that you're just sitting there creating something from nothing, or a new story for characters you love and care about. — John Wells

I write for the love of writing, and to tell a story, nothing more, nothing less. — Ron Parham

I used to love to make things - you couldn't drag me away for dinner because I was always writing a story or something. — Fiona Apple

Who but You, could breath and leave a trail of galaxies, and dream of me? What kind of love, is writing my story till the end, with Mercies pen? Only You. What kind of King, would chose to wear a crown that bleeds and scars, to win my heart? What kind of love, tells me I'm the reason He can't stay, inside the grave? You. Is it You? Stand here before my eyes, every part of my heart cries, ALIVE! ALIVE! Look what Mercy's overcome, death has lost and Love has won. Alive! Alive! Hallelujah, Risen Lord, The only one I fall before, I am His because He is, ... Alive! — Natalie Grant

The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that. — F.K. Preston

In the letters he sends to his friend, Werther recounts both the events of his life and the effects of his passion; but it is literature which governs the mixture. For if I keep a journal, we may doubt that this journal relates, strictly speaking, to events. The events of amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude: "I ran into X, who was with Y" "Today X didn't call me" "X was in a bad mood," etc.: who would see a story in that? The infinitesimal event exists only in its huge reverberation: Journal of my reverberations (of my wounds, my joys, my interpretations, my rationalizations, my impulses): who would understand anything in that? Only the Other could write my love story, my novel. — Roland Barthes

May be its a good idea to write something about you in my book ... At least then, there will be a place where we will meet everyday ... and be together forever! — Anamika Mishra

Crying cleanses the soul. — A.D. Posey

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story. — Daphne Du Maurier

I believe one of the important differences between creating literature and just telling a story around the campfire is that in literature you're recreating the experience of life, not just relaying a 'this happened, then that happened' kind of narrative. The specific details and layers of depth that make the world of the story - and what the character is experiencing in that world - as real as possible are elements I love as a reader and, consequently, elements I strive to use effectively as a writer. — Lara Campbell McGehee

I make books because I love them as objects; because I want to put the pictures and the words together, because I want to tell a story. — Audrey Niffenegger

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe. — Niall Williams

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories. — Ron Rash

People love gossip because it's slightly removed from actuality. It's a very literary thing ... You can hear a great story, and it turns out that it's largely not true. Fiction writing is like gossip. It's not malicious gossip, but it's gossip. — Lorrie Moore

He had let me know time after time that he was a thinking man, a man of intellect and wit. Yet one unintended hungry look into my eyes and he betrayed each of his words he had carefully spoken to me. I knew it in that instant. He was a viscerally driven man. And one day, he would possess me. — Coco J. Ginger

Whatever else I know, I know that if you invest love and care in any individual you can help them to make a difference, to write their own life story. — Michael Gove

Energy will go into what you love, and what you love will grow. Go for a walk and watch it bloom. — A.D. Posey

An illustrator in my own mind - and this is not a truth of any kind - is someone who so falls in love with writing that he wishes he had written it, and the closest he can get to is illustrating it. And the next thing you learn, you have to find something unique in this book, which perhaps even the author was not entirely aware of. And that's what you hold on to, and that's what you add to the pictures: a whole Other Story that you believe in, that you think is there. — Maurice Sendak

If you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there's only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of life. — Damon Galgut

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form. — Kevin Barry

A good part of the physical attraction [between the hero and heroine of a romance novel] comes to life during these exchanges as well, since language creates a meeting of the minds. I have long thought that these lines of dialogue carve out the lines of the central love relationship. The dialogue between the hero and heroine creates the central shape of the story. It is the verbal sculpture. — Julie Tetel Andresen

I want to lay under the blanket of sky and laugh while the stars wink and we write our story. — A.D. Posey

Did you finish yours, Kota?"
"Working on it now, Actually."
"How's it going?"
He sat up, turning in his chair and holding up his notebook. "I don't know. What rhymes with formaldehyde?"
My eyes widened. Gabriel laughed, rubbing his fingers against his forehead. "Dude, what kind of poem are you writing?"
Kota blinked at us. "It's about a doctor."
"Does the doctor fall in love?" Gabriel asked.
"No."
"Does someone die?"
"Not in the story, technically."
"What does he do?"
"He performs an autopsy. — C.L.Stone

Love your story. — A.D. Posey

Love is a dance. — A.D. Posey

And the wind will whip your tousled hair, The sun, the rain, the sweet despair, Great tales of love and strife. And somewhere on your path to glory You will write your story of a life. — Harry Chapin

All around us is a nothing that stretches on for infinity. We humans can barely comprehend that. If we comprehend it we are rarely pleased. — F.K. Preston

Sometimes a story catches your imagination so much it has to be told. That is what I love about writing. It lets the images in your mind burst forth into words drawing a vivid picture that takes you away on a journey that would otherwise be impossible. — S. E. Smith

Ms. Scarlett always delivers hot, sexy alphas and this isn't any different. Holy smokes, is this ever HOT! Love her writing and the way she spins a story but adds the HOT factor. Her alphas are phenomenal! - JC — Scarlett Avery

But I can't control my dreams. I can't even remember them. For all I know I'm having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can't remember. So I'm forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I'm either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one.

But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I've got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that. — F.K. Preston

Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It's unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting. — John Dufresne

Only by creating out of love will one achieve true greatness. — A.D. Posey

I write books because I have always been fascinated by stories and language, and because I love thinking about what makes people tick. Writing a story ... 'The Giver' or any other ... is simply an exploration of the nature of behavior: why people do what they do, how it affects others, how we change and grow, and what decisions we make along the way. — Lois Lowry

I love you."
I stared stupidly at him. Was he joking again, reciting another line from my story? I didn't remember writing this.
He leaned in and kissed me. I didn't respond for a few seconds. My mind lagged behind what my body was feeling.
"Say it," he whispered against my lips. "I know this is hard for you. Tell me."
"I love you." Hearing my own words, I gasped at the rush of emotion.
He put his hands on either side of my jaw and took my mouth with his. — Jennifer Echols

I love being able to create characters, give them problems, and make sure everything turns out right in the end. Writing gives me limitless opportunity to study the human condition, and a love story with a positive ending always lifts my spirits and warms my heart. — Jennie Adams

The truth is there isn't anything to me at all. All I know is that I can't sleep well, I can't dream well and I'm quite in love with you. That's all there is to me. My greatest feature is my admiration for you. I know it's not healthy. Like my insomnia. Like my dreamless nights. You make living alright. My nightmares come when I think of a night without Valeria. That's when I realise you're dead. That's when I remember you've been gone for years. That's when I remember I'm awake. And I wait for this dream called Life to leave me to my peace once and for all and forever. — F.K. Preston

I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man. — W. Somerset Maugham

Even if you're an observer of a story that you yourself made up, you're still very much connected to it. You love it and feel it, no less than somebody's who's writing from their direct 'I' or 'me.' I'm just so much more interesting in stories than confessions. — Regina Spektor

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. — Kurt Vonnegut

Writers do not have the privilege of sleep. There is always a story coming alive in their heads, constantly composing. Whether they choose it or not. — Coco J. Ginger

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story. — Ashwin Sanghi

Writing is a tough business, but never forget the reason why you write. It's for the love of story telling. Fame and fortune may elude you, but that's no reason to give up. Remember, there's always someone ready to listen to a good story. — Robert Bartram

Writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleasures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages, and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed within half a page, a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word
a glance . The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained. Her passion for tidiness was also satisfied, for an unruly world could be made just so. — Ian McEwan

The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem. — Madeleine L'Engle

Ron Carlson says, 'The most undervalued craft device that fiction writers need is empathy. You need to be able to actually imagine what your characters are going through. You've got to stay close. When you're in a story and dealing with people you're not certain of, or you've just come to meet because they've stepped into your story, it's very important to go slow and sit in their chair.'
As Carlson also says, you don't have to love the people or the characters you write about, but they should be at least as smart as you. Look beyond stereotypes. — Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

A compelling and important story of First Word War Scotland, a time when women redefined the word hope as the world was losing its innocence. Andrea MacPherson writes beautifully, balancing the lives of her characters between history and the poetry of gesture, secrets and love. — Ami McKay

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction") — Francis M. Nevins Jr.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions. — Chris Cleave

I think I was born to write. My mother would put a typewriter on the dining room table and say "there you go".

My first story was published in the Christian Herald and they would pay me five guineas. I wrote my first novel when I was just 14.

I was into mysteries and thrillers at the time but I eventually I drifted into romance because my mother would always ask me to write 'something pretty'.

I've never got bored of it because its something I absolutely love. My books are full of hope and romance rather than sex.

They are a form of escapism - you can escape the parts of the world that you don't like. — Ida Pollock

Werther identifies himself with the madman, with the footman. As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes a' la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world. In the theory of literature, "projection" (of the reader into the character) no longer has any currency: yet it is the appropriate tonality of imaginative readings: reading a love story, it is scarcely adequate to say I project myself; I cling to the image of the lover, shut up with his image in the very enclosure of the book (everyone knows that such stories are read in a state of secession, of retirement, of voluptuous absence: in the toilet). — Roland Barthes

When I write a book I write the best that I can and so much of that for me is following the book's demands, the subject's requirements - I love books, I always have. They have always been one of the places where I have felt very happy in the world. When I was younger, I loved to read genre fiction - I loved the magic-carpet ride of story! Now I need other things - I need the beautiful particular and strange language and form which brings a writer's book to life in me and speaks to my intellect, and, dare I say it, to my soul. — Micheline Aharonian Marcom

I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Living with him is like being told a perpetual story: his mind is the biggest, most imaginative I have ever met. I could live in its growing countries forever. — Sylvia Plath

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Writing is one of the best therapies that exist. Either on paper, computer, phone or tablet, in any form it is helpful. Whenever you feel like writing, just do it. Let the words flow out of your mind and heart. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone but you. Some people may find easier to express themselves in writing than verbally. While you will have time to choose the best words, you will also escape the fear of immediate reaction. Take your time and play with the words until you feel you got them right. One can write about anything. About a dream, a fantasy, a love story, happenings during the day, an apology or a greeting, everything is permitted in the world of writing. There it is no good or bad. — Nico J. Genes

We all love stories, even if they're not true. As we grow up, one of the ways we learn about the world is through the stories we hear. Some are about particular events and personalities within our personal circles of family and friends. Some are part of the larger cultures we belong to - the myths, fables, and fairy tales about our own ways of life that have captivated people for generations. In stories that are told often, the line between fact and myth can become so blurred that we easily mistake one for the other. This is true of a story that many people believe about education, even though it's not real and never really was. It goes like this: Young children go to elementary school mainly to learn the basic skills of reading, writing, and mathematics. These skills are essential so they can do well academically in high school. If they go on to higher education and graduate with a good degree, they'll find a well-paid job and the country will prosper too. — Ken Robinson

OF writing many books there is no end;
And I who have written much in prose and verse
For others' uses, will write now for mine,-
Will write my story for my better self,
As when you paint your portrait for a friend,
Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it
Long after he has ceased to love you, just
To hold together what he was and is. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. — Porochista Khakpour

You're with you 24/7; you must love you the most. — A.D. Posey

Most people do a good deal of whatever they do motivated by love. For me, few stories are truly complete without it. — Sara Sheridan

You have the capacity to change the plot line of your life, even if you've been acting from the same script since before you can remember. No matter what has happened up to this point, you have the right and the capacity to be happy. You are an innately creative being, capable of writing a love story worth living. — David Simon

I Need a Good Book

I need a good story.
I need a good book.
The kind that explodes
Off the shelf.
I need some good writing,
Alive and exciting,
To contemplate all by myself.

I need a good novel,
I need a good read.
I probably need
Two or three.
I need a good tale
Of love and betrayal
Or perhaps an adventure at sea.

I need a good saga.
I need a good yarn.
A momentous and mightily
Or slight one.
But with thousands and thousands
And thousands of books,
I need someone to tell me
The right one.

-John Lithgow — John Lithgow

Nobody with any real sense of humor *can* write a love story ... Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule. (90-91) — L.M. Montgomery

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door. — Michael Koryta

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them
with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them ... — Eudora Welty

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film. — Lorrie Moore

I can manage my own pain. I can drink. I can go to the doctor and get a prescription. I can exercise. I can write a story about it. I've done it a million times! But I don't want to see the people I love tortured and suffering. — Chuck Palahniuk

Some stories are easy to follow, and easy to tell. There is an introduction, a twist, and a happily-ever-after. And when telling the story, everyone forgets those small details, like that one quiet morning when the two of you woke wake up with the sunrise and talked about cookies. Or that night when she had her period, and the cramps were killing her, and she just needed your hug and something warm. — Andrea Tomic

If you have a story to tell, put it out there. Get the thing done. No excuses. No procrastinating. No apologies. It will never be as good as you want it to be, so forget about perfection. Just be satisfied that you've done the best work you can do at this stage in your life as an author. Then roll the rocket onto the launch pad and fire it off. After that, write another story. Always keep going. Move fast. Stay one step ahead of the forces of distraction and self-doubt. Love your characters enough to give them a good home. Love your readers enough to give them a place of refuge from life's tragedies, big and small. And love the world you live in enough to make it the world of your dreams. — James Hampton

I didn't set out to write a book with no real male characters, but men were not important to my narrator, who was much more interested in maternal and pseudo-maternal love, so they were unimportant to me. I didn't even notice the lack of men in the story until I finished it. But once I did notice it, I was kind of delighted. Apparently, my subconscious is totally sexist. — Janice Erlbaum

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day. — Ernest Hemingway,

What I love about the thriller form is that it makes you write a story. You can't get lost in your own genius, which is a dangerous place for writers. You don't want to ever get complacent. If a book starts going too well, I usually know there's a problem. I need to struggle. I need that self-doubt. I need to think it's not the best thing ever. — Harlan Coben

In the end, you have to make love to your story and see what happens. — A.D. Posey

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. — William Faulkner

We are innately creative beings capable of writing a love story worth living, and we cannot afford to miss out on the opportunity to experience nourishing relationships. — David Simon

The writing is clean. I really wouldn't have changed a word. Most of it is true, too, except that the hero quits drinking and the girl grows up. On the last page, the couple gets married, which is a nice way for a love story to end. — Melissa Bank

Somewhere In Time is the story of a love which transcends time , What Dreams May Come is the story of a love which transcends death ... I feel that they represent the best writing I have done in the novel form. — Richard Matheson

I love literature deeply. I view books as sacred things, and in writing my story, I'm going to do my best to honor the form that has played such a huge part in shaping who I am. — Flea

The main question to a novel is
did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not
story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing. — Sydney Smith

So if you are writing a story where love is the meaning, where love is the highest and best of all, where love is the point, then you have to allow each person a choice. — John Eldredge

Monsoon Love is a love story with a few comic twists. The idea for this story came to me when I went into the local town of Pokhara with a friend to buy his son a birthday present. We had just arrived at the shops when a heavy down pour began, and as we had arrived on his motorbike and didn't have raincoats or umbrellas so we had to wait for the rain to stop. We were standing under a awning watching the street while we waited, and I noticed this very beautiful young woman walk past me dressed in a t-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled half up her legs, but the way she held her umbrella made it impossible to see her face, though with the nice body she had her face must have been just as lovely. Then I though, imagine some guy stuck working in an office, and seeing a view like that every day of the same woman, and falling in love with her despite not seeing her face. — Andrew James Pritchard

Writers shouldn't fall in love with their characters so much that they lose sight of what they're trying to accomplish. The idea is to write a whole story, a whole book. A writer has to be able to look at that story and see whether or not a character works, whether or not a character needs further definition. — Stephen Coonts

I would like to tell about war and friendship among the various parts of the body, the arms that do battle with the feet, and the veins that make love with the arteries, or the bones with the marrow. All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.' Then I realize that an equally beautiful story can be told, inventing an original duel, for example, a man fighting and convincing his adversary to deny God, then running him through so that he dies damned ... — Umberto Eco

Many fiction writers have used novels to promote social change. Why couldn't I? No matter that I had no experience whatsoever writing fiction. I could learn. I decided on mysteries because I love the genre and could envisage a story featuring climate change researchers hounded by climate change doubters. — Charlene D'Avanzo

I love story-writing because I can (more or less, on occasion) actually DO it. That's really the truth. I like the idea that a story is sort of a site for making cool language effects - a site for celebrating language, and, therefore, the world. And the brevity is part of the challenge. I like stories because I get them - I know how to make beauty, or something like beauty, in that mode. — George Saunders

I get hundreds of emails daily and a lot of feedback from people that are reading or have read my books. When I'm writing, or in my daily life, I just think of the work. I love to tell a story, but I might work with a story to make it the best I can without thinking of how many people will read it or if it will influence anybody. — Isabel Allende

I was first a reader and without readers what would be the point in writing. For those of you who love a good story, thank you for being willing to read what we writerly folk create. — Michelle Dennis Evans

Audiences love both the feeling part (reliving the life) and the thinking part (figuring out the puzzle) of a story. Every good story has both. — John Truby

Writing a book is just reading one, except you get to choose the perfect ending everytime! — Jennifer Squyres

Tonight, I decided to take a stroll down to my local liquor store. Maybe I'll find a refreshment to wash down this full moon. I hate showing up & the clerk fucking knows my name, perhaps because I'm a regular. Anyways got my shit, left ... barely covering the tax. Took the long way home; to get away from that haunting typewriter. Sat down at some park bench, as I started to open my poison; A memory rushed into me. A empty bottle of Jack Daniel's under the Christmas tree. I thought my dad would want another drink, so started to pour my bottle into the dirt & cried. — Brandon Villasenor

Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story. — Mary Stuart Masterson

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret. — Silas House

As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too. — Sara Sheridan

There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It's always heartbreaking. — Ethan Hawke

When I write, I try to capture one of those pivotal moments. If I succeed, I have shifted the reader's view of the world, just a little. The character is not the only one to experience change. That is my job, shifting perceptions, one story at a time. The trouble is, I don't like writing. But I love having written. — Ellen Klages

The strangest thing about demons is that they come to love you. As much as they try to murder the very core of you when you first meet, they become your closest companions. I never asked for this devil on my shoulder. But my eyes are burning and I'm not alone. If you see a red gaze at midheaven, look away. It's exactly as they say: hell is a hungry place. — F.K. Preston