Sylvia Plath Quotes

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

I'm removed in my real life, and unable to express certain things face to face. So I have always found myself in this fantasy world. That's why I started writing songs and stories from a very young age. I'd much rather walk around anonymously cooking up tales than face the people that I have known forever.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

Language for me narrates the pictures in my mind.

I started writing stories when I was six years old. I was a very shy kid, extremely shy, and I had a fabulous first-grade teacher who told me to write.

I kept notebooks as a kid, and they were important to me.

I've always kept a journal and brought storytelling into my teaching.

Writing has always been an incredible outlet for me to feel like I have a voice, even when sometimes I was the only one reading my work. It has been a way for me to unlock my imagination. That's when the world becomes yours, after all.

Books are really fun because your 'voice' is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.