I have often wondered what brought me to writing? Was it my love for words or imagining a world with my chosen set of possibilities. In the end I concluded, it was my favourite writers and the amazing journeys I travelled with them perched on just a smattering of words. So here are 10 of my favourite quotes on writing that remind me once again why I undertook this journey of words.
1. “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov
2. “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.” ― Lloyd Alexander
3. "We are the storytelling animal."
- Salman Rushdie
4. "I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries."
- Stephen King
5. "Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers."
- Isaac Asimov
6. "You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all." - George Bernard Shaw
7. "The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible." - Mark Twain
8. "The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself."
-Albert Camus
9. "Let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences."
-Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
10. “When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” - George Orwell
I would love to know what inspires you to write....