Sunday, 26 May 2019

Writing - Quotes

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines. - Emile Zola

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

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

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 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

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