Writing Quotes - Page 103

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

Walter Mosley

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

Roman Payne

The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming, too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within, too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again, too many divorces to grant, heirs to disinherit, trysts to arrange, letters to misdirect into evil hands,innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever, women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless, men to drive to adultery and theft, fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses.

Michael Chabon

Ink, a Drug.

Vladimir Nabokov

Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

Maud Hart Lovelace

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

Sherman Alexie

True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

Françoise Sagan

Imagination is Everything!

Termina Ashton

A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter.

Jonathan Safran Foer

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

Ian McEwan

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.Of course, some people want literature to be difficult and there are writers who like to make their readers toil and sweat. They hope to be taken more seriously that way. I have always tried to achieve a prose that is easy and conversational. And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.

Ruskin Bond

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

Louisa May Alcott

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Ernest Hemingway

To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

Akira Kurosawa

As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

Sherman Alexie

She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.

Christopher Poindexter

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

Steven Pressfield

Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

Dodie Smith

A story is alive, as you and I are. It is rounded by muscle and sinew. Rushed with blood. Layered with skin, both rough and smooth. At its core lies soft marrow of hard, white bone. A story beats with the heart of every person who has ever strained ears to listen. On the breath of the storyteller, it soars. Until its images and deeds become so real you can see them in the air, shimmering like oases on the horizon line. A story can fly like a bee, so straight and swift you catch only the hum of its passing. Or move so slowly it seems motionless, curled in upon itself like a snake in the sun. It can vanish like smoke before the wind. Linger like perfume in the nose. Change with every telling, yet always remain the same.

Cameron Dokey

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Robert Hass

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

Arthur Miller

I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.

Anaïs Nin

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

Neil Gaiman

The book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore's best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It's hard to describe just how much better the book is.It's like, "If the movie was an episode of Battlestar Galactica with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is Citizen Kane with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end." That's how much better it is.

Warren Ellis

Put your soul in the palm of my hand for me to look at, like a crystal jewel. I'll sketch it in words...

Yasunari Kawabata

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

Maya Angelou

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

Isabel Allende

Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice.

Patricia A. McKillip

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.

Jennifer Donnelly

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

H.G.Wells

They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better.

James Franco

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

William Faulkner

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

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

Elie Wiesel

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

Bell Hooks

If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

John Steinbeck

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

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Milan Kundera

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Allen Ginsberg

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

Betty Smith

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.

Octavia E. Butler

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

Oscar Wilde

You can't edit a blank page

Nora Roberts

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

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.

Don DeLillo

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.

Agatha Christie

The professor leaned forward. “But there’s nothing more profound than creating something out of nothing.” Her lovely face turned fierce. “Think about it Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.

Rainbow Rowell

It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

Haruki Murakami

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Winston S. Churchill

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Samuel Johnson

Writing is a delicious agony.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder.

J.R.R. Tolkien

I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Anne Lamott

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.

Alice Munro

If you're young and talented, it's like you have wings.

Haruki Murakami

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

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

Robert Cormier

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.", Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]

Susan Sontag

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

Previous 1 … 101 102 103 104 105 … 122 Next

Writing Quotes - Page 103

Related Topics