Quotes & Sayings About Writing Your Thoughts

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

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

If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life
whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours. — Don Roff

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

Inspiration do not come and cannot be found, it has to exist - somewhere, somehow. Do believe that what you are doing is the most important thing in this world, and do believe that your words can be magical. Because I know they can be and I know they are. If you feel that you are lost in your own mind, don't think, just write. Sometimes we have to erase our thoughts and memories to gain enough strength to be able to write down our inner thoughts. If you don't know what it is, if you think it's ridiculous or silly, you're definitely on the right way. Sometimes you will hate your words and sometimes you will love them. This is the fun part of greatness in which the other part definitely will be your devil. Remember; with greatness comes obstacles. — Liv-Christine Hoem

Thoughts. Your imagination. The voices inside your head. They're all the same thing and spirit is what fuels it. — S.A. Tawks

Set an intention to heal any unexpressed anger that may be present in your life. Go to a quiet place with pen and paper. Take a few deep breaths. Ask your anger to speak to you. Write down the thoughts and feelings. When you are finished, forgive yourself for holding on to the anger for so long. — Iyanla Vanzant

It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable. — Ashly Lorenzana

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

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is the
resultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and these
you must study, each by itself, if you would create a living
character. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleeting
thoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts. — Jules Verne

This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina ... close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. — Leon Uris

If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you're writing, ask yourself what's bothering you and write about that. Sometimes your creative energy is like water in a kinked hose, and before thoughts can flow on the topic at hand, you have to straighten the hose by attending to whatever is preoccupying you. — Natalie Goldberg

Writing a manual forces you to place your thoughts and ideas down on paper. — Tara VanDerveer

Writing means organizing your thoughts. If your mind is scattered, your writing is scattered. If your mind is focused, your writing will be clear. Then your reader will say, 'Yes, I get it. — Robert Peate

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

Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it. In your writing, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved or love now or even your career. How is this experience related to who you would like to become, who you have been in the past, or who you are now?. — James W. Pennebaker

Sometimes you control your demons and sometimes it controls you. — J. Limbu

The little box that was given to me was by no means unique. I'd heard of prayer boxes, and I knew what they were for.
... Any scrap of paper will do, anywhere, anytime of the day or night. The important part, in a world of fractured thoughts, hurried moments, and scattershot prayers, is to take the time to think through, to write down, to clarify in your own mind the things you're asking for, the things you're grateful for, the things your're troubled about, the hopes you've been nurturing.
And then?
Put them in the box and ...
Let. Them. Go.
That's what trust is. It's letting go of the worry. It's the way of peace and also the way of God. such a hard road to travel for people like me, who are worriers. When I'm writing a story, I control the whole universe. In life ... not so much. Actually, not at all. Things happen that I hadn't anticipated and wouldn't choose and can't change. That's the tough part. — Lisa Wingate

I've found is that by doing stand-up, I've actually learned how to combat depression. I don't have clinical, but I've definitely had my bouts with it. I just figured out that it's a choice. You're in control of your brain. When your brain is sending you bad information or bad thoughts, you can decide to go to the gym, or write a new joke - or if you're on the road, go to a ball game ... something that's going to get the blood going. Or you can let those thoughts take you right down the rabbit hole. — Bill Burr

To you, it's a book to read - a nicely printed stack of paper with a beautiful cover. To me, it's a living, breathing thing that I have invested my heart and soul in. It's much more than a stack of paper to me. It's my imagination - come alive in your hand. — Jason P. Stadtlander

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

Then took the quilt out of its linen wrapper for the pleasure of the brilliant colors and the feel of the velvet. The needlework was very fine and regular. Adair hated needlework and she could not imagine sitting and stitching the fine crow's-foot seams.
Writing was the same, the pinching of thoughts into marks on paper and trying to keep your cursive legible, trying to think of the next thing to say and then behind you on several sheets of paper you find you have left permanent tracks, a trail, upon which anybody could follow you. Stalking you through your deep woods of private thought.
— Paulette Jiles

I wondered, Why would you run with someone else? Why would you choose to share this intense, solitary activity, mile after mile, in sunshine and rain, alone with your thoughts, every step making you leaner, firmer, every mile taking you farther from the lazy, lethargic world? Like writing and eating, I couldn't stand to share my running. It was such a personal thing: a therapeutic punishment, a way to push, push, push myself. — Emma Woolf

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 whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as being negative or harmful before they become a part of your being, before they become some kind of action like writing an angry letter to someone or speaking too strongly to someone. — Pankaj Mishra

Form the habit of writing your thoughts. The mechanical element assists the power of concentration. — T. Sharper Knowlson

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95 ... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper. — Natalie Goldberg

Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words.
I'm addicted to words. — Stjepan Varesevac Cobets

Do you wonder that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets: people will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy; not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations."
"How do you know?
how can you guess all this, sir?"
"I know it well; therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were writing my thoughts in a diary. — Charlotte Bronte

It's good for you to write down your thoughts. It's
therapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think about
life. — Katie Kacvinsky

There is no greater feeling of accomplishment than to create a world that solely exists in your imagination and be able to pull someone into this hidden place inside of my thoughts. To make someone care for a person that has manifested from my dreams, to make them hate me for putting them in danger, and for them to ask to be taken on another journey with me when it is all said and done is why I write. — Teresa Mummert

Isn't it fun to work - or don't you ever do it? It's especially fun when your kind of work is the thing you'd rather do more than anything else in the world. I've been writing as fast as my pen would go every day this summer, and my only quarrel with life is that the days aren't long enough to write all the beautiful and valuable and entertaining thoughts I'm thinking. I've finished the second draft of my book and am going to begin the third tomorrow morning at half-past seven. It's the sweetest book you ever saw - it is, truly. I think of nothing else. I can barely wait in the morning to dress and eat before beginning; then I write and write and write till suddenly I'm so tired that I'm limp all over. — Jean Webster

Write and your experiences with others. Never underestimate your writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There is nothing more nerve-racking than waiting as someone reads your writing. The reader becomes the videographer, zooming far, far into your heart and soul, unveiling every inch and corner. The writer remains a wary observer at the mercy of the reader, clueless as to how he might react. The writer is exposed, laid bare; her innermost thoughts and feelings are revealed in a potentially scathing moment of vulnerability. I trusted Peter so fully ... in a way that I could not explain. For that very reason, it mattered so immensely. To actually tell him what I knew he had already often seen in my eyes was to allow him to enter a new dimension in that world. And it mattered. It really, truly mattered. — Gina Marinello-Sweeney

You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It's a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time. — Ben Gibbard

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

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that's going to happen is if you actually do it. People can't read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.
So you have to do it, goddamnit. — Dave Eggers

Has it taught you to look at things different?' he asked.
i thought, How does he know about all that? But i didn't have to ask him, because he just nodded toward his house.
'I bounce around them four walls a lot, Victor. I write some letters, I keep in touch with people. Putting your thoughts on paper, it makes you stop and notice stuff. Kind of slows you down. — Peter Gould

Heart-to-heart journaling is a dialogue with God where both you and God are talking and you are recording it on paper. Heart-to-heart journaling is simply writing out your thoughts to God and what you sense to be His answer or response to you. — Linda Boone

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion. — Red Haircrow

Lord Bacon said, "Writing makes an exact man." He spoke the truth. Writing produces exactitude by forcing you to set down ideas in logical relation to one another. Writing crystallizes your thoughts and makes your ideas specific. — John Haggai

I think the goal with any writing, but especially narrative nonfiction, is to put the blockade of putting your thoughts in this unnatural medium of print and then trying to reach through that and actually convey what's going on, what you think, and make people laugh and recognize themselves while doing it. Definitely the laughing thing. — Sloane Crosley

To make my diary a little different I am going to call it a Thought Book ... I have thoughts that I never can use unlesss I write them down, for Aunt Miranda always says, Keep your thoughts to yourself. — Kate Douglas Wiggin

I got through breakfast and most of a meeting before thoughts of you consumed me. I told everyone I was sick and am now hiding in my room, writing to you, hoping this will make me feel like your home again.
-Maxon — Kiera Cass

Slowly, then all at once.
Slowly, as I take my time to know the things that would endear me to you. Slowly, as I attempt to cultivate a bond I hope would never easily sever. Slowly, as I get to know all your demons, and try to decide if I'm okay living with them everyday. Slowly, I also unleash my demons on you, hoping they won't make me look ugly, wouldn't make you think less of me.
Slowly, as I let myself get used to the idea that you can be a possible permanent fixture in my life. Slowly, as I tell the difference between what I think I see, and what's really there. Slowly, as I find myself looking to you for reassurance that hey, I'm alright. Slowly, as I find my thoughts drifting toward you when I see or hear or find things that remind me of you. Slowly, as I catch myself dedicating to you all of the pieces that I've been writing. — Nessie Q.

There is a word I have always avoided in my writing, my life, my thoughts. That word is love. What does it mean? How do you deal with it? If you find it and lose it, how do you get over it? Love is something you feel and when you feel it you can't trust it or define it. How can you sustain love for a long time? A short time? You may love your family, your friends. But you don't invite them inside your body. — Chloe Thurlow

Writing is a kind of repository and can help create a space for the accommodation of new thoughts and feelings. If you don't write these stories down, your heart will be filled up and broken by them. — Xinran

Every spoken thought is just a symbol for something inside your brain. This word, out here, is like that thought in there. But it's never exact. So, looking at it another way, every word you say is a lie. — Peter Gould

I enjoy singing the songs a certain way, but I don't even know how the writing even began. To me, it's work that is kind of invisible; it's a weird kind of work to have because you're not working, but it's not not work. Formulating your thoughts and making a melody that's catchy enough for people to listen to what you're saying is really hard! — Angel Olsen

Our words are often only vague, inadequate descriptions of our thoughts. Something gets lost in translation every time we try to express our thoughts in words. And when the other person hears our words, something gets lost in translation again, because words mean different things to different people. "A long time" may mean 10 hours to one person, but 10 days to another. So when a thought is formed in my brain, and my mouth expresses it in words, and your ears hear it, and your brain processes it, your brain and my brain never truly see exactly the same thing. Communication is always just an approximation. — Oliver Gaspirtz

The challenge of a journalist is to condense a thousand thoughts into a single sound bite. The challenge of an author is to place a simple idea on a canvas as infinite as your imagination. No doubt about it. I have the easier job. — Charles A. Cornell

While I did a lot of research, I ended up feeling that the best way to write about grief was to describe it from the inside out - the show the strange intensities that come along with it, the peculiar thoughts, the longing for that past - all the strange moments of thinking you glimpse the dead person on the street, or in your dreams. — Meghan O'Rourke

A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea. — Douglas Preston

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

If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness. — Anonymous

What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.
As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late. — Ted Hughes

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts, and pray long prayers? — Martin Luther King Jr.

I have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them. But this book has nearly killed me. Because, you see, a book? A book has a cover. They call it a jacket and that jacket keeps the inside warm so that the words stay permanent and everyone can read your genius thoughts over and over again for years to come. Once a book is published it can't be changed, which is a stressful proposition for this improviser who relies on her charm. I've been told that I am "better in the room" and "prettier in person." Both these things are not helpful when writing a book. I am looking forward to a lively book-on-tape session with the hope that Kathleen Turner agrees to play me when I talk about some of my darker periods. One can dream. — Amy Poehler

How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvelous. — Haruki Murakami

Always write with passion. Think of writing as a way of bringing all your hopes, dreams, and thoughts to life. — Cherlina Works

There is nothing to writing, all you have to do is, sit on the computer and bleed your thoughts. — Santosh Kalwar

May I suggest that you write, that you keep journals, that you express your thoughts on paper. Writing is a great discipline. It is a tremendous educational effort. It will assist you in various ways, and you will bless the lives of many-your families and others-now and in the years to come, as you put on paper some of your experiences and some of your musings. — Gordon B. Hinckley

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children - you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it. — Sahara Sanders

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent. — Pat Conroy

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

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

Writers live with fear. Some writers cannot deal with the fear, and so they quit or refuse to publish. In order to write, you must either ignore the fear or trick it into leaving you alone. The fear is very sly, though and hard to trick. The fear in writing comes from exposing your thoughts, your emotions, your experiences, your ideas, your talent, your intelligence and ultimately your self to public scrutiny and possible scorn. The fear is by no means groundless. You have opened yourself up to the possibility of public humiliations...I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest novel ever written isn't gathering dust in some filing cabinet somewhere, simply because its author could not overcome the fear of having it published. — Patrick F. McManus

I really like to travel when I write. Something about seeing new things and being in new cultures and environments provokes new thoughts in your head. — Josh Radnor

Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like ... What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result? — Sonja Lyubomirsky

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

The ink in your pen never reshapes your thoughts, you must replace the ink before the ink can be inked properly. — Michael Bassey Johnson

Inspiration comes from your writing. Thoughts meander subliminally through our subconscious, at night when we sleep the brain is working. In the act of writing, phrases come out and you think: wow, did I write this? Did I have that insight? Sometimes you know something is good, good within your own limits, and those parts make life worth living. — Chloe Thurlow

When you travel with your family, you may not get the volume of work done you would if you were alone, but you can still do something while recharging. If nothing else, you can gather your own thoughts, write down ideas, observe people around you, and reflect on experiences. Working doesn't always mean putting words on paper. — Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Writing is a intensely personal activity. I can pen down my best thoughts when I'm alone. But when one is elevated into the stature of an author, you have to think about your books in terms of their business angle. — Ashwin Sanghi

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts. — William Safire

There is nothing like writing to force you to think and get your thoughts straight. — Warren Buffett

After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Journaling is the single most effective tool you may ever find for deeper intimacy with Father God and Jesus. It is a heart-to-heart method of communication with God. For you see, it is God's desire to intimately commune with you and to have you intimately commune with Him. Journaling facilitates this heart-to-heart communion - it is simply listening to each other's heart and writing it down.
Journaling helps you hear God's voice. God is speaking to you most of the time. Often you do not differentiate His voice from your own thoughts and therefore do not realize you are actually hearing God's voice. If you can learn to clearly discern His voice speaking within you, you have found the font of intimacy - the heart of God speaking to you. — Linda Boone

Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life. — Drew Myron

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. — Eugene Manlove Rhodes

May the ink of your thoughts never dry. — Joanie Schirm

Be mindful of your thoughts and words for they are the pen writing that which will manifest. — Sanjo Jendayi

By writing out your desires and goals on a piece of paper, you send a red flag to your subconscious mind that these thoughts are far more important — Robin S. Sharma

To help you fill in the details of the world you are creating, imagine that your characters inhabit a real world. Daydream what it would be like to be there. What would your characters eat, what would they talk about, where would they get their supplies, etc. Keep asking the question, "What happens next?" Show your characters actions and write down their thoughts — Christopher Paolini

It's tempting to preface everything with "In my life I've found" so that people can't yell at me for being wrong (I often am) or misinformed (sure) or overly emotional (HOW DARE YOU). But this is a book about my life so I have to simply hope that unsaid disclaimer is just implied. This is my life, and my observations of it, and they change as I change. That's one of the frightening things about writing a book that no one ever tells you. You have to pin down your thoughts and opinions and then they exist on a page, ungrowing, forever. You may convince yourself that you were never stupid or coarse or ignorant but one day you reread your seventh-grade diary and rediscover the person who one day becomes you, and you vacillate between wanting to hug this unfinished, confused stranger and wanting to shake some damn sense into her. — Jenny Lawson

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

The writing life is brutal on a wounded mind. It really is. So much time spent alone. So much time spent in self-reflection. Emotional wounds heal in other people's hearts but you have to reopen yours and examine them in order to re-create their painful feelings on the page. Ugly, twisted, vicious thoughts flitter through other people's minds, but you have to seize yours and hold them to the light in order to understand the soul's shadowy corners. You have to shred your comfortable pieties. You have to tear your illusions to feathers and rags. When you're working well, you become bad company, inward-turning, querulous, obsessed. — Andrew Klavan

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing. — Marilynne Robinson

Committing your thoughts and feelings to words is like putting your soul on a plate and hoping the diners will like what they eat. — Fennel Hudson

Dear, Missus, Mister - I beg you never to give thoughts to war, in no way, not to work for it, not by writing nor by reading about it nor by looking at the pictures nor on the television about it. Not in any way ever, at all. Not by being a soldier, sailor, airman, work in factory or above all at atom bombs. Above all at atom bombs. No obligation for this, dear fellow creature. Signed Your Fellow Creature.'
'P.S.,' said Gerald slowly, without turning from the window, 'If we all do this, we shall succeed. — Stella Gibbons

Honestly, I do not believe in a drunk Byron writing beautiful verses. Inspiration can pass through the soul just as easily in the midst of an orgy as in the silence of the woods, but when it is a question of giving form to your thoughts, whether you are secluded in your study or performing on the planks of a stage, you must be in total possession of yourself. — George Sand

I spend all my time trying to keep thoughts away and ignore them ... But here you are, trying to remember your own life, writing your thoughts down so that you don't forget. I suddenly realized what it would be like not to know, not to remember. — Michael Scott

I think anybody who is writing finds he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters, at least in this kind of a strip. It's the only way that you can survive when you have to do something every day. You have to put yourself, all of your thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip. — Charles M. Schulz

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

Sacred-thoughts flashes in your mind at sacred-time. If you don't write it immediately, it will be forgotten. — Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Thoughts are ideas scattered in your head. When written forms a sentence. When rhymed, it forms a phrase and singing it blooms a beautiful poem. — Ymatruz

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

I think writing for anybody helps you order your life. It helps you arrange your emotions and your thoughts and it helps to provide perspective. — Michael Ian Black

Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face. — Guy Kawasaki