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Quote of the Day
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Quote of the Day
Top 100 Quotes
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Quotes by American Authors
- Page 16
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
Dan Alatorre
My characters still talk the way normal people talk. They argue, they are sarcastic with each other, they joke around. I usually end up with one outrageous minor character in each book that people just rave about. We all have that one friend who says and does things that are a riot. A character like that is the salt in the soup: you want just enough to bring everything to life.
Dan Alatorre
On working with other writers: You develop honesty and you can then ask the really embarrassing questions. I have learned so many things I didn’t want to know, and they were all a result of interesting interviews for background information.
Dan Alatorre
We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we're sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language so that other human beings, whenever they feel like it, may open his book and dream that dream again.
John Gardner
Writers get ideas all day every day. The FedEx guy delivers a package from Sears and the writer is thinking how it could actually be a ticking time bomb.
Dan Alatorre
Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.
Dan Alatorre
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
Annie Dillard
All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
Sean Hinn
Rejection sucks. It sucks every time, whether it's a big suck or a little suck. But it's part of the process. It's part of being a writer. It's a badge that says 'I'm serious about this, and I'm sending out my work.
Allison K. Williams
At the day's end, a writer lives alone with her story, wrestling with characters and settings, and the way light filters into and out of a scene. The deeper messages often escape her.Sometimes I take for granted the journey through the telling. At other times I curse the muse's power. But through it all, I live each day in deep gratitude.
Jacqueline Woodson
Movies and television may be influencing writers to write more visually, using immediate scenes with specific points of view to put their stories across. But fiction can always accomplish something that visual media will never be able to match....One of the great gifts of literature is that it allows for the expression of unexpressed thoughts: interior monologue.
Renni Browne
Sometimes you have to tell a a bunch of lies to get at the truth.
Stella Atrium
This is important to writing. . . that is, it is important to my own writing. This. . . is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place.
Patricia MacLachlan
The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
Jacques Barzun
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
Tenaya Jayne
God, Himself, wrote the 10 into stone with his own finger. He told the epic of mankind, our origins and our future, in a book. For me, there is no more noble a cause and no more honorable a vocation than to say, like Him, I am a writer.
Gerard de Marigny
There will be pages. Lots and lots of pages. Most of the pages will have letters on them, and a vast majority of these letters will be in the Roman alphabet.
Aaron Allston
Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Thomas Harris
I just write whenever I can.
Elmer Kelton
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
Betsy Lerner
You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling
When you write, it’s like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women of your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoi daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers.
Edwidge Danticat
The paradox of writing is that you’re trying to use words to express what words can’t express.
Stephen Fischer
My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess.
Gene Wolfe
A successful story always offers its audience more than a simple resolution of events. A story offers a dramatic affirmation of human needs that are acted out to resolution and fulfillment. Even when that resolution and fulfillment are dark, the journey can still be vivid, potent and illuminating.
Bill Johnson
Good fiction makes the truth believable.
Tarrant Smith
Begin your writing, fiction or article, where the action begins. This action can be internal (e.g., an important insight or personal decision) or external (e.g., a murder or calamity). Begin too early, you lose your reader. Begin too late, you lose your story.
Walt Shiel
I had declared in public my desire to be a writer ... I wanted to develop a curiosity that was oceanic and insatiable as well as a desire to learn and use every word in the English language that didn't sound pretentious or ditzy.
Pat Conroy
I never really feel that I’m stuck. I actually think that people are never stuck, there’s no such thing as writers block, I think that theres terror that can silence you. But if you can think of it as a dynamic thing I mean a writers block, it’s a paralysis an immobility and the thing that has immobilized you is a very powerful force. Immobility is itself an act, it’s a choice. It can sometimes take as much energy to remain immobile as it does to be mobile. And if you think of it in a dynamic way then it’d freeze you from the sense that at some point your talent will simply abandon you and you’re just a vacant shell with nothing to say, I don’t think that ever really happens. But I think that terror, bad experience, trauma and so on can absolutely silence you.
Tony Kushner
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Flannery O'Connor
I’ve come to the end of another book alive. At times like this I’m always at a loss for words.
Joe Coomer
Writer's block? I've never heard of a plumber complain about plumber's block.
Robert B. Parker
Each letter has a shape, she told them, one shape in the world and no other, and it is your responsibility to make it perfect.
Kim Edwards
There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
Stephen E. Ambrose
What I don't write is as important as what I write.
Jamaica Kincaid
Words are the bones. Writing is the lungs. Reading is like breathing.
T.L. Crain
There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.
Milton Lomask
Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.
Stephen King
If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.
Lisa Cron
Part of being a writer is defending your vision and not caving in to outside pressures.
Jennifer Crusie
Slaying dragons, melting witches, and banishing demons is all fun and games until someone loses a sidekick—then it’s personal. The bad guy isn’t just the “bad guy” anymore, he’s the BAD GUY!
Michael J. Sullivan
One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline.... But also every single day a kid needs a break.
Anne Lamott
Don’t write what you know—what you know may bore you, and thus bore your readers. Write about what interests you—and interests you deeply—and your readers will catch fire at your words.
Valerie Sherwood
I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page.
Nora Roberts
The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.
Miranda July
Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Bernard Cornwell
If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either
James M. Cain
c.t“So, hunny, don’t waste your time trying to label or define me…’cause I’m not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I’m all of that and then some. And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.
George C. Wolfe
Play hard. Play, play, play like your life depends on it. Because it does.
Dean Koontz
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.
Sarah Ruhl
Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.
Sarah Ruhl
I hate parties.And a wedding is the biggest party of all.All the guests arrived and Orpheus is taking a shower.He's always taking a shower when the guests arrive so he doesn't have to greet them.Then I have to greet them.A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.I always thought there would be more interesting people at my wedding.
Sarah Ruhl
If I am a pawn in someone else's chess game, you better believe I am going to demand an explanation before being shoved at some rook. I'll play my part, damn it, but I want the courtesy of being asked for my consent!
Thomm Quackenbush
To paraphrase the famous Walt saying, Cast Members are there to work so Guests can play.
Leslie Le Mon
The goal is not simply to 'work hard, play hard.' The goal is to make our work and our play indistinguishable.
Simon Sinek
First sons and daughters seduced to play and party 'til it was too late to realize they were being lead to the slaughter. They discounted the law of moderation.
T.F. Hodge
Give up trying to convince people who you are, instead confuse them. It is a lot more fun!
Shannon L. Alder
How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn't do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?
Marsha Norman
Mama:...you can keep trying. You can get brave and try some more. You don't have to give up.Jessie: I'm NOT giving up. This IS the other thing I'm trying. And I'm sure there are some other things that might work, but MIGHT work isn't good enough any more. I need something that WILL work. THIS will work. That's why I picked it.
Marsha Norman
Mama: But something might happen. Something that might change everything. Who knows what it might be, but it might be worth waiting for! (Jessie doesn't respond.) Try if for two more weeks.Jessie: No, MamaMama: i'll pay more attention to you. Tell the truth when you ask me. Let you have your say.Jessie: No, Mama. This is how I have my say. This is how I say what I thought about it ALL and I say No. To Dawson and Loretta and the Red Chinese and epilepsy and Ricky and Cicel and you. And me. And hope. I say No.,
Marsha Norman
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