Wayne Dyer Quotes

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

I like to write and that's why I write. I don't think about how much the book will sell.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Do not set out to write with your eyes on the box office. It can't be done.

I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

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.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never choked off my writing by competing with myself, or with anybody else for that matter. My ambition was absolutely centered on the work itself, never on what it would bring me, or "who" it would make me. I never cared about that at all.

Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the misery, the grind, are forgotten everytime; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.