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- Page 155
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Paul Auster
If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.
Stephen King
If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.
Stephen King
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
Ray Bradbury
You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.
Ray Bradbury
The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
Paul Auster
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.
Robert McKee
If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page.This is how we go on.
Stephen King
The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.
Stephen King
I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.
Cormac McCarthy
When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.
Stephen King
I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
Stephen King
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
Stephen King
Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
Neil Gaiman
You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.
Joss Whedon
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
Stephen King
Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.
Raymond Chandler
It is the tale, not he who tells it.
Stephen King
You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.
Warren Ellis
Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?
Ian McEwan
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
Stephen King
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
Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.
Joss Whedon
Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.
Neil Gaiman
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.
Ian McEwan
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
George R.R. Martin
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
Stephen King
So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
Stephen King
If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
Stephen King
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect.
George R.R. Martin
A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.
Sidney Sheldon
When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.
Stephen King
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
Stephen King
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Stephen King
Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.
Joss Whedon
When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.
Neil Gaiman
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it
Roald Dahl
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
Stephen King
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
Ray Bradbury
You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.
Richard Price
Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
Ray Bradbury
People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
Joss Whedon
A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.
Stephen King
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen King
Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
Stephen King
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
Neil Gaiman
You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.
Joss Whedon
This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
Neil Gaiman
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.
Stephen King
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Ray Bradbury
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Stephen King
Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.
Neil Gaiman
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
Stephen King
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
Stephen King
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
Neil Gaiman
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
Ray Bradbury
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