Impactful Writing Quotes

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.

When you're a writer, you talk about things that move you, that you feel really deep inside you that's something that moves you, and you hope it'll move people, too.

You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.

If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

There are two tests that we [writers] have for all of our writing: So What? and Who Cares? There is an answer to both. The answer to Who Cares is that a reader cares, if the writing is good. The answer to So What is that these ideas give us completely new understanding, change our sense of who we [people] are and why we're here [on this planet].

I hope Anne's book will have an effect on the rest of your life so that insofar as it is possible in your own circumstances, you will work for unity and peace.

Think of a book special to you, and how much bleaker and poorer your life would be if that one writer had not existed - if that one writer had not, a hundred times or a thousand, made the choice to write. You're going to be that one writer one day for somebody you may never meet. Nobody can write that book you're going to write - that book that will light up and change up a life - but you.

The point of what I do is that it doesn't really matter what a book or a story is as long it moves you, informs you, challenges you, entertains you, or changes you.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.

Before I wrote The Power of Now, I had a vision that I had already written the book and that it was affecting the world. I had a sense there was already a book somehow in existence. I drew a circle on a piece of paper and it said "book." Then I wrote something about the effect the book had on the world, how it influenced my life and other people's lives, and how it came to be translated into many languages affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

I wanted to be a writer that had an impact. I wanted, and still I say the same thing, I want to write books that change people's lives, change how we think and live and read and write. I wanna write books that are read in 50 or 100 years.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

My favourite emails are along the lines of, 'My 14-year-old doesn't read much, but I gave him your book and he finished it in two days.' This has been the most rewarding experience.

The reason you write something that is exciting and visceral is to force people to hear what you have to say, especially if you're in any kind of marginalized community where people don't want to listen. You have to come up with tricks to make them listen.

Two dads have sent me letters that said my books changed their daughters' lives. I send them packages with T-shirts and posters because, come on... that's the coolest.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way.

It's one of the things that 'Everwood' - what makes a great 'Everwood' episode is when it makes you laugh and cry, sometimes at the same time. From the first season, we've always had the chance to deal with death in a very real way, in a way that a lot of other shows can't or don't.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.

I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.

There's no better feeling as a writer than to see your piece going beyond what you can have ever imagined. And a wonderful way for that to happen is for new audiences to discover it.