Writing Quotes - Page 108

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Write what should not be forgotten.

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.

By now, it is probably very late at night, and you have stayed up to read this book when you should have gone to sleep. If this is the case, then I commend you for falling into my trap. It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of his books. It goes back to authors being terrible people who delight in the suffering of others. Plus, we get a kickback from the caffeine industry...

Brandon Sanderson

You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.

Ellen DeGeneres

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

James A. Michener

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.

I hate writing, I love having written.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." (1980)]

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

You can make anything by writing.

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.

A word after a word after a word is power.

Margaret Atwood

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.

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.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

Caroline Gordon

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

Philip José Farmer

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.

Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.

Daphne du Maurier

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.

The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

Meg Cabot

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

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.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Henry David Thoreau

Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The first draft of anything is shit.

Ernest Hemingway

I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.

There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.

W Somerset Maugham

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

Charles Dickens

you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.

William Wordsworth

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

Madeleine L'Engle

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

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