Busy Quote by Miriam Toews

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder.…

— Miriam Toews

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when…

— Kate Braverman

“One thing writers have in common is the need to procrastinate. People don't really understand this, but it's not avoiding work, it is work.…

— Steven T. Seagle

“I am a storyteller, for better and for worse. I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition, going…

— Oliver Sacks

As writers we live life twice, like a cow that eats its food once and then regurgitates it to chew and digest it again.…

— Natalie Goldberg

I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and…

— Ellen Ullman

Writing is like a bird-watcher watching for birds: the stories are there: you just have to train yourself to look for them.

— Barbara Mertz

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while,…

— Emma Donoghue

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life.…

— Alice Walker

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to…

— Zadie Smith

Writing is always a process of discovery—I never know the end, or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There’s a…

— Kim Edwards

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

— David E. Kelley