Writing Quotes - Page 12

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

Sam Shepard

Write for impact first, money second. If you do it the other way around, you’ll end up with less of either.

Don Roff

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

R.D. Ronald

Writing is a solitary occupation, except for Presidential speeches and sitcoms.

Ron Brackin

The closer one gets to the speed of light, the slower time travels. The exact thing is true when completing a book.

Daniel Ionson

He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.

Kate DiCamillo

You will not publish 100% of the books you don’t write.

M. Kirin

There is no ceremony, no initiation ritual, no secret hand-shake. All you need to be a writer is to write.

M. Kirin

You have to be in your middle thirties before you have anything worth saying.

Peter Bowen

Writing with a biro is the emotional equivalent of giving your loved one a plastic rose on Valentine’s Day.

Fennel Hudson

Proper writing ink comes in a bottle, can be swirled like brandy in a glass, and smells like apple blossom after rain.

Fennel Hudson

As with writing by candlelight, one’s greatest ideas come from ‘the flickering’ between darkness and light.

Fennel Hudson

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E.L.Doctorow

Often as writers, we are surprised by what we learn about ourselves. It runs counter to what we’ve thought about who we are. But it is closer to the truth.

Rob Bignell

Through the act of writing, a writer learns more about himself than he could ever imagine.

Rob Bignell

The beginning of every writing session is like setting down a road unknown.

Rob Bignell

When I told my teachers I wanted to be a writer, alot of them encouraged me to lower my expectations and to be more realistic. So I rode away on my magical, winged horse, spraying faerie dust behind me, and laughing manically as I went.

M.E. Vaughan

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

Shirley Jackson

Your dreams don’t stop being dreams because of circumstances.

Jason E. Hodges

There is no value in your promises. They are as hollow as fangs and poisonous as the venom within them once I allowed them into my heart.

Jason E. Hodges

A poet’s words are like mortar to the bricks of society.

Jason E. Hodges

There is a fine line between fair criticism and jealous assault.

Fennel Hudson

Writing is hard…It gets harder when it becomes your career, your job, because it’s no longer a hobby, it’s no longer a manuscript hidden in your desk drawer. It becomes a platform from which the world can judge you. Your soul becomes target practice, and the critics hold the arrows.

Karina Halle

A writer must expect other people to criticize their work and open-mindedly consider all worthwhile suggestions. Martial arts master Bruce Lee advised anyone attempting to master a difficult enterprise to learn from other people but also liberally experiment and judiciously draw from our own well of intelligence and talent. ‘Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

Kilroy J. Oldster

But if you needed to HAVE AN IDEA, boredom could be to a roadblocked novel what chemotherapy was to a cancer patient.

Stephen King

Writing fiction or nonfiction is a lonely battle wrestling with sentences in an effort to put together an intelligible thought that speaks for the author.

Kilroy J. Oldster

Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators, and if you are friends with them, and if you say anything funny at dinner, or if anything good happens to you, you are in big trouble.

Nora Ephron

Anyone who writes books is at least mostly an introvert. It’s amazing to be able to share that internalized part of myself, that little world that no one really knows about. I just wrote down it down on a piece of paper just to be crazy, and people loving that is so strange.

Pierce Brown

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Gina McKnight

Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.

E. L. Tenenbaum

I don’t so much hope that any reader “agrees” with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

A good story is one liked. A great story is one that challenges thought, defiant and gets mouths talking.

Veronica Purcell

Isolation is a gift. Everything else is just a test of your endurance. You will be alone with the Gods. Your nights will flame with fire.

Charles Bukowski

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

Flannery O'Connor

Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.

Flannery O'Connor

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

John Banville

A rain forest springs from the droppings of animals and grows greater than any cultivated garden; likewise, a great mass of literary skill springs from the droppings of writers that cross our minds through the reading we do.

Agona Apell

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

Avijeet Das

Your sensitivity, your tenderness, your eyes make me pick up my pen and write, Mrignayni!

Avijeet Das

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Annie Dillard

The writing in itself is transformative for me.

Sophia Rose

I believe the greatest pleasure in writing is in the progressive artistry of it. Each project is an attempt to do better than before - to produce a worthy work of art - something having meaning not only for the writer but also for those who may share the experience of it later. I treasure the hope of producing something that will make a difference in the world - some kind of positive change.

Linda Jo Martin

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations.

Paul Valéry

When addressing religion in morphology the average person will seek religious texts and otherwise human instruments and tools to explain the Universe or their own spiritual experience. Yet human hands are not paws or clawed. Humans are not quadrupeds so texts for cats is kind of out of the question one might think.

Leviak B. Kelly

If ever again we happened to lose our balance, just when sleepwalking through the same dream on the brink of hell’s valley, if ever the magical mare (whom I ride through the night air hollowed out into caverns and caves where wild animals live) in a crazy fit of anger over some word I might have said without the perfect sweetness that works on her like a charm, if ever the magic Mare looks over her shoulder and whinnies: “So! You don’t love me!” and bucks me off, sends me flying to the hyenas, if ever the paper ladder that I climb so easily to go pick stars for Promethea—at the very instant that I reach out my hand and it smells like fresh new moon, so good, it makes you believe in god’s genius—if ever at that very instant my ladder catches fire—because it is so fragile, all it would take is someone’s brushing against it tactlessly and all that would be left is ashes—if ever I had the dreadful luck again to find myself falling screaming down into the cruel guts of separation, and emptying all my being of hope, down to the last milligram of hope, until I am able to melt into the pure blackness of the abyss and be no more than night and a death rattle,I would really rather not be tumbling around without my pencil and paper.

Hélène Cixous

Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

Don Roff

I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.

Julian Barnes

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.

William H. Gass

As the saying goes- “Habit trumps desire”. If you are a writer, you have to be writing. Write everyday. Set targets and meet them. Keep reading, keep learning, keep growing.Do not try to be a person you are not. Great writing is genuine and true. Remember to have the time of your life while at it :-)

Roxanna Aliba Kazibwe

When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.

Maurice Blanchot

I’ve said for years — ever since I figured out how to write Goblin Hero — that it’s important to give yourself permission to write crap. Perfection is the destroyer of art. It’s paralyzing. Art, whether it’s writing or painting or anything else, requires risk. And risk means you’re going to make mistakes. Sometimes you’re going to fail.

Jim C. Hines

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

Mark Twain

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino

I die with the dying light, yet shine brighter as the darkness approaches. Soon I’ll be whittled to bone and stripped clean through, nothing left but a skeleton on which to hang a hat. But have no fear, I look good in hats.

Chila Woychik

This world rubs me raw, scours me smooth like an SOS pad put to a grease-caked skillet. And pain: it stabs and scrapes and pulls me back to earth, my final B&B, that worm-spun cot of cool black sod.

Chila Woychik

My thoughts are with you all. Forever conscious of the vast, absurd universe and writing my eternal story I shall remain dead, but dreaming.

A.P. Sweet

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

Donald Maass

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.” ― Gustave Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.

Donald Barthelme

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Writing Quotes - Page 12

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