Writing Quotes - Page 107

Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.

Alan W. Watts

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.

Ursula K Le Guin

It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.

Ashly Lorenzana

A book is a suicide postponed.

Emil M. Cioran

For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.

Virginia Woolf

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Ernest Hemingway

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

Jules Renard

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

E B White

Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can’t quite keep up with gravity.

Rainbow Rowell

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

There is such a place as fairyland - but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

L.M. Montgomery

Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express.

Brenda Ueland

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Stephen King

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

Anthony Burgess

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Isaac Asimov

Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.

Joss Whedon

Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.

Sylvia Plath

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

Margaret Atwood

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 small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Anthony Trollope

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]

Toni Morrison

I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

Louisa May Alcott

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

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

Ernest Hemingway

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

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

Ray Bradbury

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Nora Roberts

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

Jennifer Weiner

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

Chuck Palahniuk

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Anne Lamott

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

J.R.R. Tolkien

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

George Orwell

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

great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it.

Charles Bukowski

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

Lady Gaga

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Christopher Hitchens

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.", Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]

John Green

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?

Cornelia Funke

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

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]

Franz Kafka

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Ernest Hemingway

In writing, you must kill all your darlings.

William Faulkner

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

Ishmael Reed

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Thomas Jefferson

All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Anaïs Nin

I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Sharon Olds

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

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Albert Camus

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

Toni Morrison

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

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Mark Twain

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Writing Quotes - Page 107

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