Cheryl Strayed Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Jobs, Sex, Reading

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.248, Atlantic Books Ltd

• I write to find what I have to say. I edit to figure out how to say it right.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, Figures, Edits

  "What’s More Important to You: the Initial Rush of Prose or the Self-Editing and Revision That Come After It?". www.nytimes.com. March 24, 2015.

• You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Book, Writing, Waiting

• People do support themselves as artists and writers, so there's no need to be all doom and gloom about it. You just have to push forward. You have to follow your vision and hope for the best. You have to write for love.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, Artist, Doom And Gloom

• Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, Men, Thinking

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.45, Atlantic Books Ltd

• Write like a motherfucker.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.41, Atlantic Books Ltd

• The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, Thinking, Giving

• And if you're gonna be a writer, you just truly have to be a writer. You have to throw yourself into it and deal with the negative consequences of that. And there are negative consequences. I mean, there are. But, it's also true that you wouldn't be interviewing me right now if I had worked at the post office. You wouldn't. I would be still writing, but I wouldn't have gotten as far as I've gotten, because I wouldn't have had the time.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, Mean, Office

  "Put It in a Box and Wait: The Millions Interviews Cheryl Strayed". Interview with Robin Grearson, www.themillions.com. October 18, 2012.

• Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Book, Writing, Blue

  Cheryl Strayed (2015). “Brave Enough: A Mini Instruction Manual for the Soul”, p.71, Atlantic Books Ltd

• Of course you want someone special to love you. A majority of the people who write to me inquire about how they can get the same thing... Unique as every letter is, the point each writer reaches is the same: I want love and I'm afraid I'll never get it. It's hard to answer those letters because I'm an advice columnist, not a fortune-teller. I have words instead of a crystal ball. I can't say when you'll get love or how you'll find it or even promise that you will. I can only say you are worthy of it and that it's never too much to ask for it.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Love You, Writing, Unique

• I think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Children, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing can be such a lonely endeavor that I do think community is also important.Meeting at cafes and exchanging work and reading to each other and giving each other little bits of encouragement and feedback and thoughts, I think that's an incredibly rich experience because what it does is it gives you a sense of community but also purpose. If I know I'm going to meet you in a cafe next Tuesday, I'm going to write something that I can hand to you. Discipline is such a challenge for so many writers and so I think that that's a key benefit of being in a group.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Lonely, Encouragement, Reading

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Growing Up, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing is such a strangely and radically private act, and yet its purpose is this great sense of connection and community. I mean, I wanted people to love the book. And the only way to get them to love it is to try to make it good for them. So of course the audience has to be considered.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Book, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The writing life doesn't move in a straight line. I've had successes and rejections all along the way, at every stage of my career, and I will continue to do so. Acceptances and rejections don't define me. They're both part of what it means to be a writer. My job is to simply keep doing the work.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Moving, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Hard Work, Writing, Errors

• The only way I've been able to stay informed without letting fury rule my life is to channel my rage into something that ultimately feels like love to me. The place I do that the best is in my writing. That's where I feel like I can tap into the power of story and maybe bring something good into the world.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Writing, World, Rage

  Source: www.wbur.org

• A lot of people go off and have fun adventures, or hard adventures, and their impulse is to write about them right away. What really makes a difference is having some perspective on what happened.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Fun, Writing, Adventure

• I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English degree and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say, Oh.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Motivation, Writing, People

  Cheryl Strayed (2013). “Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who’s Been There”, p.98, Atlantic Books Ltd

• With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

  Cheryl Strayed

  Book, Writing, Hands

  Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.bostonglobe.com. March 2, 2013.

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