Writing Quotes - Page 105

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

Charles Bukowski

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

Cornelia Funke

Good fiction creates its own reality.

Nora Roberts

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

Carolyn See

Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.

Ernest Hemingway

You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism.

Warren Ellis

I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words.

Craig Claiborne

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

H.G.Wells

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Edgar Allan Poe

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it.

Benjamin Disraeli

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

Alfred Hitchcock

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Terry Pratchett

Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about.

Nicole Krauss

Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.

Oscar Wilde

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Haruki Murakami

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

C.S. Lewis

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

C.S. Lewis

Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.

Salman Rushdie

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

Abigail Adams

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Tim O'Brien

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

Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!

Lee Child

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

George Orwell

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

John Waters

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

Ian McEwan

I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.

Hunter S. Thompson

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.

Toni Morrison

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Flannery O'Connor

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

Austin Kleon

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

Samuel Johnson

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

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

Arthur Rimbaud

Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.

Joss Whedon

Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Gloria Steinem

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

Molière

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Gustave Flaubert

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

Harper Lee

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

Truman Capote

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

David Sedaris

You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest.

Coco J. Ginger

Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.

André Gide

I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. I am just trying—trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself.

Roxane Gay

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

Charles Baxter

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

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

Anaïs Nin

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

unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it

Charles Bukowski

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Anne Lamott

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.

Muriel Barbery

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Franz Kafka

A good book isn't written, it's rewritten.

Phyllis A. Whitney

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

Isaac Asimov

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

Robin McKinley

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

John Green

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

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Writing Quotes - Page 105

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