A bad book is as much of a labour
to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul. - Aldous
Huxley
A
line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's
thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught. - William
Butler Yeats
A
novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of
false ones that make up most of what we call life. - Saul
Bellow
A
plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a
more striking effect without the author's comment. - William
Shenstone
A professional writer is an
amateur who didn't quit. - Richard Bach
A
word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it
from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket. -
Charles
Peguv
A Writer... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. - John dos Passos
A
writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as
there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the
well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the
well dry and wait for it to refill. - Ernest
Hemingway
A
writer is a reader moved to emulation. - Saul
Bellow
A writer only becomes a true
writer by practising his craft, by experimenting constantly with language, as a
great artist may experiment with clay or oils until the medium becomes second
nature, to be moulded however the artist may desire. - Christabel Lamotte
A
writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously
in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble
himself with formalities? - Saul
Bellow
A writer writes not because he is
educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need
to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be
understood. - Leo Rosten
A
writer’s duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner
beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real
character ever can. -
Debasish
Mridha
A
writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew
but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew,
too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a
writer can do. - Andy
Rooney
All
adventure stories need antagonists to challenge the heroes. These can
be natural enemies – sea storms, breaking dams, great white sharks
– human enemies, or both. To add as much excitement as possible,
you need to show why these opponents are so dangerous. -
Tish
Farrell
All
good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really
happened. -
Ernest
Hemingway
All
readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is
the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of
fiction. -
Steve
Almond
All there is to
writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas. - Robert Frost
An
author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts
serves him best. - Amos
Bronson Alcott
And
by the way, everything in life is writeable
about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to
improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. -
Sylvia
Plath
Any
man who keeps working is not a failure.
He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned
virtues of hard, constant labour, he’ll eventually make some kind
of career for himself as writer. -
Ray
Bradbury
Any
writer who would make the most of [the challenge] must meet it well
equipped, trained, prepared – not necessarily with exactly the same
understandings and opinions as his fellows, or with identical skills,
but with his own natural abilities and aptitudes developed to their
optimum (something that is very largely up to him) – and this
applies not only to the new and unpublished writer but to each of us
who looks out on the world as it is and the universe as we are
finding it to be and sets his or her mind to adventuring among the
dangers and difficulties and strangenesses we know or suspect are
there. -
Reginald Bretnor
Anything
that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write. - John
Dos Passos
As
for the story, whether the poet takes it ready-made or constructs it
for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then
fill in the episodes and amplify in detail. - Aristotle
At
one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I
found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the
notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't
forget it – it will haunt you till it’s written. - Truman
Capote
Beginning
a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and
the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to
begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to
treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings
and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book
than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down
the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it – that's
what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I
often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a
paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning,
start there; that's the first paragraph of the book. - Philip Roth
Better
one line that will survive the author than a hundred books outlived.
-
Unknown
Better
to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the
public and have no self. - Cyril
Connolly
Brevity
is the sister of talent. - Anton
Chekhov
Completing
a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of
relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you
have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of
post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new
book. The consolation that next time I will do it better. - John
le Carre
Composition
is a process of combination, in which thought puts together
complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary
qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort,
without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving
birth to something living – something, that is to say, which, by a
kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as
orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and
charm. - Henri-Frederic Amiel
Crossing
out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It
requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be
removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself – the
greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to
sacrifice parts in the name of the whole. - Yevgeny
Zamyatin
Don't
write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than
dissipate it over a dozen. - Jack
London
Each
book starts from ashes. - Philip
Roth
Employ your time
in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily
what others have labored hard for. - Socrates
Even
the best writer has to erase. - Spanish
Every
great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original,
must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
- William
Wordsworth
Every
word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped. - Jeanette
Winterson
Every
writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel. -
Austin
O’Malley
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life. - Philip Roth
Everybody
wants to feel that you're writing to a certain demographic because
that's good business, but I've never done that ... I tried to write
stories that would interest me. I'd say, what would I like to
read?... I don't think you can do your best work if you're writing
for somebody else, because you never know what that somebody else
really thinks or wants. - Stan
Lee
Everyone
who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens
something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to
recognize before. - Georg
Christoph Lichtenberg
Everything
you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of
everything you touch. - Hans
Christian Andersen
Failure
has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have
what it takes to see it through. -
Markus Zusak
Fiction
is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to
get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the
material you're writing about before you alter it. - Hunter
S. Thompson
Fiction
is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life. - Martin
Amis
Fiction
shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it
is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered
by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the
ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures,
or strives to endure. - Eudora
Welty
Fiction
– at least for me – requires long, relatively uninterrupted time
stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a
two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on
Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a
largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to
be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly,
however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today
to any of us with regularity. - Samuel R. Delany
Fine
writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a
laboured style. - William
Shenstone
First
forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you
whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish
your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice. -
Octavia
E. Butler
For
a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and
when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
- Ursula
K. le Guin
For
a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries
again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try
for something that has never been done or that others have tried and
failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. - Ernest
Hemingway
For
those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the
creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint
concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as
real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to
sculpt. - Dan
Simmons
Get
an agent. Seriously, submitting stuff unagented means it will end up
on the slush pile. An agent is the first quality filter, and a good
agent is worth his or her weight in gold, as they'll often know the
editors on a personal level and will be able to talk to them directly
about the project. - Tim
Lebbon
Go
to any lengths to avoid preachiness! If you have to choose between
the message and the story, always choose the story. - Elizabeth
Zelvin
Good
fiction creates its own reality. - Nora
Roberts
Good
writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. - Edward
Albee
Good
writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact
that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon. - E.
L. Doctorow
Habits in writing as in life are
only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous. - William Somerset
Maugham
Hate
the autocracy of the kept gates all you like, but the forge of
rejection purifies us (provided it doesn't burn us down to a fluffy
pile of cinder). The writer learns so much from rejection about
himself, his work, the market, the business. Even authors who choose
to self-publish should, from time to time, submit themselves to the
scraping talons and biting beaks of the raptors of rejection. Writers
who have never experienced rejection are no different than children
who get awards for everything they do: they have already found
themselves tap-dancing at the top of the "I'm-So-Special"
mountain, never having to climb through snow and karate chop leopards
to get there. - Chuck WendigI must write it all out, at any
cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of
living. - Anne Lindbergh
Here
is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons.
They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.
All they do is show you've been to college. - Kurt
Vonnegut
Here’s
a slightly outrageous tip: Don’t respect the text. Just because
you’ve written something down doesn’t mean it has a right to
exist. If your internal editor can find a better way to say
something, junk the original version and go with the new one. If you
can’t find a better way, and the passage really isn’t good, junk
it. -
Crawford
Kilian
Here's
a news flash – writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types
like me are driven by one impulse – to make up a world in which we
get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who
exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will
win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty,
has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone
else happy. - Victoria Laurie
How
one writes is a bit of a mystery to oneself. You just do it. My
experience is that I sit down and write and I make it sound right to
me, or sound good or interesting. And that's it. - Adam
Phillips
Human
nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
- Carlos
Ruiz Zafon
I
believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they
don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to
focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an
interesting flaw that readers can relate to. - Jeff
Abott
I
consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.
- Washington
Irving
I
decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it
as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession.... It was the
most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful
thing to do with my life. And I didn't question if I should – I
just kept sharpening the pencils! - Mary
Oliver
I
do everything they tell you not to. I go back and fix things as I go,
otherwise I can't move forward. I don't write every day, I write in
binges. I don't write drafts, what I write, fixed as I go, is pretty
much what gets published. Everybody writes differently, and there are
a lot of people who want everybody to write in the same way, people
who have a lot invested in telling people to write a whole crappy
first draft and then revise it, and so on. That absolutely doesn't
work for me. I tell people there are things they can try, and things
that might help, but there aren't any rules, except to do what works
for you, what gets the story on the page. - Jo Walton
I
don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk
about them I don't want to write them any more. I write to find out
what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing
except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer
to do. - Charles
de Lint
I
gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow. - Kirby
Larson
I
just go to that same daydream-spot inside my head that I'm pretty
sure all of us have. I don't know if people who don't write for a
living actually meet strangers there, but I do, on a regular basis,
and I absolutely insist they arrive with a good problem and tell me
about it. There are particularly good spots for productive
encounters: there's a beach I imagine and if I sit long enough and
stare down the length of it, I'm sure someone will come walking down
it, and most of them are interesting when they arrive. Sometimes I
don't write all I meet, but most of the ones I meet do have
interesting backgrounds. And sometimes I find I'm not on that beach
at all, but in some space station corridor or in some castle hallway.
Once these strangers tell me a little about their worlds I can make
up the rest, out of smidges of geology, geography, history,
archaeology, and snippets of whole cloth, and once I know their
history and their quirks, I can most often figure out the rest of the
story. Translation: thinking up new ideas and characters isn't hard.
Writing day and night for months ... that's hard. - C. J. Cherryh
I
like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated
writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel
that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always
have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but
which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your
signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you
won't get anywhere. - Cormac McCarthy
I
like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because
when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go
for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to
be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and
that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too
much. - Harper
Lee
I
never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from
the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work,
every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul.
Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd
been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my
career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write,
you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my
Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent, the editor
edit, the publisher publish. - Nora
Roberts
I
really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're
trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have.
- John
Green
I
think any start has to be a false start because really there's no way
to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off
the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start
second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a
possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to
keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know
it's really a false start is when you start ... it's hard to put into
words. - Elif Batuman
I
think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir
up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us,
and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write
about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it?
That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them
and as they are. - Markus
Zusak
I
want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during
your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when
you want to forget the world around you. The nicest notes I've
received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back
into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater
compliment. - Jeff
Abbott
I
want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that
won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books. -
Louisa
May Alcott
I
was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink
and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic. - Carlos
Ruiz Zafon
I
will write my way into another life. - Ann
Patchett
Ideas
are infinite – writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it
fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in
a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but
one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on
the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those
keys. - Nora
Roberts
If
it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a
disgrace to have written a bad one. - Christian
Nestell Bovee
If
there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking. - Cormac
McCarthy
If there's a book you want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison
If
you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have
sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write. -
Somerset
Maugham
If
you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools
to write. - Stephen
King
If
you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters
have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you. -
Alan
Lightman
If
you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams
– the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn. -
Robert
Southey
If you write a page a
day, you will be an author of a thick book in a year. Great results will take
shape when small efforts are continually put in over time. - Unknown
If
you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character,
unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as
interesting to the reader. - Stan
Lee
If,
while observing the boundless universe, the writer is able to
scrutinise his own self as well as others, the resulting incisiveness
of his observations will far surpass objective descriptions of
reality. - Gao
XingJian
I'm
all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools.
Let's start with typewriters. - David
Gerrold
I'm
never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters
that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them
and get to be friends with them. - Julie
Andrews
In
creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must
first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in
which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and
comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a
complex and believable imaginary world. - Orson
Scott Card
In
going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing
what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write
with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to
put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a
whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than
to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and
well-oiled in the closet, but unused. - Ernest Hemingway
In
order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that
it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also
separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has
written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a
creative necessity. - Julian
Barnes
In
secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of
losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure
foundation of power in a writer. - Christian
Nestell Bovee
In
the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the
pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering
them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also
in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean
something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all.
In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and
can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and
faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a
little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and
clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life
with every word I wrote, and I knew it. - Tobias Wolfe
In
the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain
works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly
useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the
details sometimes unfold in the dream. - Doris
Lessing
In
utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable. - John
Steinbeck
In
writing ... remember that the biggest stories are not written about
wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are
written about the things which draw human beings closer together. -
Susan
Glaspell
In writing
biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fiction
parts should be printed in red ink, the fact parts in black ink. - Catherine Drinker Bowen
It
is usual that the moment you write for publication – I mean one of
course – one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is
being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it
to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This
removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless
audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and
a lack of self-consciousness. - John Steinbeck
It’s
none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them
think you were born that way. -
Ernest
Hemingway
It's
hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against
your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain,
you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers
enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the
process of writing it. - Carlos
Ruiz Zafon
It's
tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having
them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite
there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful
thrill to it. But it is hard. - Elizabeth
Strout
It's
very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So
then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? -
Kelly
Link
Keep
your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today –
all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about
where publishing is going – and write the best story that you can.
It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are
having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that
is the single key to success. - Jeff
Abbott
Learn
to write well, or not to write at all. - John
Dryden
Many
writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The
most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the
writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that
once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the
desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting
down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem
fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the
desk, you will submit to the story that must be told. - Walter
Mosley
My
job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make
readers want what I give. - China
Mieville
My
method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say,
and then to say it with the utmost levity. - George
Bernard Shaw
My
most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you
write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip. -
Elmore
Leonard
No
music. No rituals. At home I write in my office or on the laptop in
the kitchen where our puppy likes to sleep, and I love his company.
But I've trained myself to be able to work anywhere, and I write on
trains, planes, in automobiles (if I'm not the driver), airports,
hotel rooms. I travel often. If I couldn't write wherever I was I
would get little done. I also can write in short bursts. Fifteen
minutes are enough to move a story forward. - Gail Carson Levine
No
writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine
thought and feeling. - Eleanor
Roosevelt
Not
that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it
short. -
Henry
David Thoreau
Nothing you write, if you hope to
be good, will ever come out as you first hoped. - Lillian Hellman
Novels
are like paintings, specifically watercolours. Every stroke you put
down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original
strokes are still there in the texture of the thing. - Joan
Didion
Omit needless words. Vigorous
writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph
no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no
unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that
the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat
his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. - William Strunk
Once
writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death
can stop it. - Ernest Hemingway
One
forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines. -
Emile
Zola
One of the few things I know about writing is this:
spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, right away, every time. Do not hoard
what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it,
give it all, give it now. - Annie Dillard
One
of the most interesting parts of writing is that you can think about
it all of the time. Writers get their ideas all day and all night
long, not just when they sit at their writing tables. No one will see
your thoughts, but inside you head you can always wonder and ponder.
“Hmmm… that’s strange.” Or, “I might write about that
later.” When you write, you notice things that other people do not.
Artists and scientists do this too. To create, one must observe. -
Edgardo H. Pangilinan
Only
a generation of readers will spawn a generation of writers. -
Steven
Spielberg
Prison
always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the
twin demons of mobility and diversion. - Dan
Simmons
Read
heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's
selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market
trends; they are fleeting. - Jeff
Abbott
Rejections
are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
- Octavia
E. Butler
Remember
that in today's market, distribution and promotion are as important
as craft. But don't forget what made you want to write fiction. If it
was for the money, you're in the wrong business! - Elizabeth
Zelvin
Rewrite,
rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an
architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst
critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft. - Tobsha
Learner
Science
fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet,
but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing
will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes
some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is
always the art of the possible, never the impossible. -
Ray
Bradbury
Sit down and
put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an
author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy
most of it. - Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
So
often is the virgin sheet of paper more real than what one has to
say, and so often one regrets having marred it. -
Harold
Acton
Some
people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society
has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck. - Bob
Lonsberry
Start writing a new chapter, for
if you live by the book you’ll never make history. - Ben Sobel
Talent alone
cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which,
by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which
exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
That
writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he
would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel.
Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by
what he adds, but by what he takes away. - Charles
Caleb Colton
The
act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in
turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our
equilibrium. -
Norbet
Platt
The
art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing
fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the
reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the
writer's mind. - George
Henry Lewes
The
Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with
what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when
they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and
start again. Don’t whine when things are not going your way,
because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more
important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. -
E.A. Bucchianeri
The
business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first
and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents
of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a
phase of history. - John
Dos Passos
The
chief advantage that ancient writers can boast over modern ones,
seems owing to simplicity. Every noble truth and sentiment was
expressed by the former in the natural manner; in word and phrase,
simple, perspicuous, and incapable of improvement. What then remained
for later writers but affectation, witticism, and conceit? - William
Shenstone
The
factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and
ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky. - Samuel
R. Delany
The
final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the
writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on
the street, a book, a phrase learned. - Anais
Nin
The
first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we
do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves,
using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what
we feel strongly about – these become our characters and go to make
our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they
have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals
every time. - Eudora Welty
The
first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and
then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to
see it and that you can shape it later. - Anne
Lamott
The first page sells that book.
The last page sells your next book. - Mickey Spillane
The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis.
- William Styron
The
great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more
interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are
not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is
really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite
know what it is. - Sam
Shepard
The
less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay
to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. - Lawrence
Block
The
man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his
creation does not die. - Luigi
Pirandello
The
more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and
write. Try not to be hard on yourself. - Gail
Carson Levine
The
old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the
rule is brevity – but every word must be supercharged,
high-voltage. - Yevgeny
Zamyatin
The
pen is mightier than the sword. - Edward Bulwer Lytton
The
poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words
of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new
articulation, renew them. - Eugene
Ionesco
The
privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow
down and to consider things. - Chris
Abani
The
process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although
when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's
doing you. - Robert
Stone
The
process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have
to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow
yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. -
Walter
Mosley
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself. - Albert Camus
The really great writers are
people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited
experience and unlimited imagination. - James A. Michener
The reason that there are so few
good books written is that so few people who write know anything. - Walter
Bagehot
The
right story needs the right telling. - John
Green
The
role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are
unable to say. -
Anaïs
Nin
The
role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are
unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction
contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a
shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than
the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The
writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand
our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness. -
Anais Nin
The
same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him
dread they are not good enough to deserve reading. - Jean
de la Bruyere
The secret of good writing is to
say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way. - Richard
Harding Davis
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. - Charles
de Lint
The
trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas
real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers. - Iain
M. Banks
The waste basket is the writer's best friend. - Isaac Singer
The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything. - John Irving
The
writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only
then can he see clearly. - Julian
Barnes
There
are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure
you're going to make a living – cook books and detective stories. -
Rex
Stout
There are two kinds of writers;
those that make you think, and those that make you wonder. - Brian Aldiss
There
is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that
tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting
from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That
word – tension – has an animal insistence for me. A piece of
writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the
rope and the reader holds the other end – is the rope slack, or is
it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is
going to be? - John Jeremiah Sullivan
There
is no way of writing well and also of writing easily. - Anthony
Trollope
There
would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That
was writing. - Markus
Zusak
There's
no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as
perfect despair. - Huraki
Murakami
Things
that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first
thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing
in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be
absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may
draw on facts from your own life, but if they are not in harmony with
your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them. -
Saul Bellow
To
finish is sadness to a writer – a little death. He puts the last
word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on
and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done. - John
Steinbeck
To
leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real
art; it makes the work inexhaustible. - Ursula K. le Guin
To
produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. -
Herman
Melville
To
this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an
answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot
answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I
had written a book, I would have given up. - V.
S. Naipaul
To write simply is as difficult as to be good. - William Somerset Maugham
To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself. - Anne Rice
To
write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy
people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home
in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing
from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way
anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public,
or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. - Virginia Woolf
To write what
is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible
people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author. - Charles
Colton
Trouble
not thyself about the fate of thy writings: if what thou hast writ be
worth preserving, no flood, however mighty, can sweep it away; if it
be worthless, no ink, however prepared, can make it indelible. - Ivan
Panin
True
ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who
have learn'd to dance. - Alexander
Pope
Two sorts of
writers possess genius: those who think, and those who cause others to think. -
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We
all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose
prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and
sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the
time. - Anne
Lamott
We
are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing
how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out. - Ray
bradbury
Wearing
down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work. - Ernest
Hemingway
Well,
the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who
don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer. - Ursula
K. le Guin
Well,
there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great
deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am
falling back on something that has served in the past – it is a
sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is
anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases. - John
Ashbery
What
I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to
write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest
piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place
in the manuscript one hopes to publish. - Thomas
Wolfe
What
separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is
their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to
write a good sentence, another to write a good book. - Katy
Lederer
What
you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his
own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to
take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from
mere information. - Robert
Stone
When
a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun
too. - Stephen
King
When asked, "How do you
write?" I invariably answer, "one word at a time." - Stephen King
When
I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition
of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word
appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
- Jane
Hirshfield
When
I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I
can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its
sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to
me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down
part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's
already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I
add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the
so-called reality of this one. Since I write almost every day, and I
think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must
spend more time in all these places than here. - Tanith Lee
When something can be read without
effort, great effort has gone into its writing. - Enrique Jardiel Poncela
When you take stuff
from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research. - Wilson
Mizner
Without
a pen in my hand I can't think. - John
le Carre
Write a wise saying and your name
will live forever. - Unknown
Write
and share your experiences with others. Never underestimate your
writings. It can bring hope and inspiration to many people. - Lailah
Gifty Akita
Write
injuries in dust, benefits in marble. - Ben
Franklin
Write
what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. -
Howard
Nemerov
Write what you like, then imbue it
with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of
life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. - Stephen King
Write.
Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story
ideas. Don't give me a bunch of "somedays." Plant your ass
and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all, it will
leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English. - Glen
Cook
Writers
are made – forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and
insecurities. - Chuck
Wendig
Writer's
block is only a failure of the ego. - Norman
Mailer
Writers
in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the
medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going
to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of
passionate default. - John
Barth
Writers
kid themselves – about themselves and other people. Take the talk
about writing methods. Writing is just work – there's no secret. If
you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes – it's
still just work. - Sinclair
Lewis
Writers like teeth are divided
into incisors and grinders. - Walter Bagehot
Writers,
especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great
influence on the public mind. - Edmund
Burke
Writing
a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of
some painful
illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not
driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. -
George
Orwell
Writing a book is a very lonely
business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your
obsessions and memories. - Mario Vargas Llosa
Writing
a killer first line to a novel is an art form in which there are a
few masters and a great many apprentices. - Chuck
Wendig
Writing
and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen
and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make
us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their
truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy
is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least
clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed
by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a
terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing
can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on
that ship. - Anne Lamott
Writing became such a process of
discovery that I couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know
what I was going to say. - Sharon O'Brien
Writing
can't be a way of life – the important part of writing is living.
You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. -
Doris
Lessing
Writing
in the first person can be claustrophobic – everything that happens
in the book is notionally filtered through the narrator, and one can
long for the fresh air of another perspective. One can luxuriate in
the peculiar world of a character, but there are limitations.
Ironizing that person's experience is difficult. You need perhaps a
candid old friend of the narrator who can tell a few truths the
narrator prefers to ignore. - Alan Hollinghurst
Writing
is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about
certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about
them. - Don
Delilllo
Writing
is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted. -
Gerald
Asher
Writing
is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not
write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness,
melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human
situation. - Graham
Greene
Writing
is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is
the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. - Ann
Patchett
Writing
is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing
total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of
pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the
experience. -
C. J. Cherryh
Writing
is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words. - Charles
Simic
Writing
is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in
sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when
you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the
further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we
know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall. - Kate
Braverman
Writing
is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street
you make a mud pie. - John
Le Carré
Writing
is something you do alone. It’s a profession for introverts who
want to tell you a story but don’t want to make eye contact while
doing it. -
John
Green
Writing
is the dancing of words, sometimes it is beautiful and meaningful,
sometimes it is not. - Debasish
Mridha
Writing is the supreme solace. - William
Somerset Maugham
Writing
keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence.
It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences.
The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all
day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a
marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to
godliness as I can get.... The great thrill is when a sentence that
starts out being completely plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far
above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it.
That's what keeps me going on those dark December days. - John
Banville
Writing
the first chapter can feel like you're trying to artificially
inseminate a stampeding mastodon with one hand duct taped to your
leg. That's okay. That's normal. Do it and get through it. - Chuck
Wendig
Writing when properly managed, is
but a different name for conversation. - Laurence Sterne
You
become a serious novelist by living long enough. - Don
Deilillo
You
can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't
know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling
the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and,
two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal
life, to be a writer. - Doris
Lessing
You can’t write about people out
of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply
and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have
the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal
to the highest intelligence. - Katherine Anne Porter
You
don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and
thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It's
just so easy to give up! - Octavia
E. Butler
You don’t write because you want
to say something, you write because you have something to say. - F. Scott
Fitzgerald
You
have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to
write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always
fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have
had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind
your best ideas. - Tobias
Wolff
You
have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to
the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms
of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the
attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you
towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that
we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you
are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from
your hands. - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
You
keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections
and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a
point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your
perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes. - Anne
Lamott
You
must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do
nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out
again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have
talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you
persist. - Isaac
Asimov
You
must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray
Bradbury
You
never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night
to write. - Saul
Bellow
You
never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you
discover truths you never knew existed. - Anita
Brookner
You
simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear
them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a labourer or
as an artist. - Anne
Lamott
You
will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels
like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging
suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your
bullshit, realize you're the literary equivalent of a vagrant
painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You
will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard.
You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, yesterday, or ten years
ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them
out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway. - Chuck
Wendig
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. - Meg Rosoff
