Writing Quotes - Page 106

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

Winston S. Churchill

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

Diane Setterfield

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T.S Eliot

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

Alexandre Dumas

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

the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever

Charles Bukowski

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

H.P. Lovecraft

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

George R.R. Martin

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Lewis Carroll

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

Natalie Goldberg

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

Richard Bach

One should use common words to say uncommon things

Arthur Schopenhauer

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Virginia Woolf

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

Ted Hughes

Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river.

Lisa See

If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.

George Gordon Byron

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.", 1964)

Colette

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

Stephen King

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

Oscar Wilde

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Sylvia Plath

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives.The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.”The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get.The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said.The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.”But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.”My bones said, “Write the poems.

Andrea Gibson

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

David Mitchell

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~

Dr. Seuss

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

Franz Kafka

You are what you write.

Helvy Tiana Rosa

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.

Charles Baudelaire

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

Flannery O'Connor

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Joan Didion

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.

Virginia Woolf

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

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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

As for literary criticism in general: I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel or a play or a poem is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Write about the emotions you fear the most.

Laurie Halse Anderson

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

Jackie Collins

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

George Orwell

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.

Anne Lamott

The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie

I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn’t have to write at all anymore if I didn’t want to. It was the end of some sort of career. I don’t know why, exactly. I suppose that flowers, when they’re through blooming, have some sort of awareness of some purpose having been served. Flowers didn’t ask to be flowers and I didn’t ask to be me. At the end of Slaughterhouse-Five…I had a shutting-off feeling…that I had done what I was supposed to do and everything was OK .

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Ann Patchett

Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Vladimir Nabokov

With writing, we have second chances.

Jonathan Safran Foer

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

Ernest Hemingway

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

Paul Valéry

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

Philip Pullman

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

E.M. Forster

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge Luis Borges

He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.

Charles Bukowski

If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.

Martin Luther

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Franz Kafka

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.", February 25, 1933]

Cyril Connolly

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

J.D. Salinger

The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible

Vladimir Nabokov

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

Voltaire

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Writing Quotes - Page 106

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