Writing Quotes - Page 5

A pencil is a wand and a weapon. Be careful. Protect yourself. It can be glorious.

Read good writing, and don’t live in the present. Live in the deep past, with the language of the Koran or the Mabinogion or Mother Goose or Dickens or Dickinson or Baldwin or whatever speaks to you deeply. Literature is not high school and it’s not actually necessary to know what everyone around you is wearing, in terms of style, and being influenced by people who are being published in this very moment is going to make you look just like them, which is probably not a good long-term goal for being yourself or making a meaningful contribution. At any point in history there is a great tide of writers of similar tone, they wash in, they wash out, the strange starfish stay behind, and the conches.

Rebecca Solnit

We get our voice from the voices of others. Read promiscuously. Imitate, copy, but become your own voice.

Colum McCann

Remember: Writing is drawing.

Danny Gregory

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

Lera Auerbach

The end is everything.

Arthur K. Flam

Never give your opinion on someone's writing unless they ask sincerely, and never ask for someone's opinion unless you're sincere.

Justin Alcala

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.

Graham Greene

A short story is a writer's way of thinking through experience... Journalism aims at accuracy, but fiction's aim is truth. The writer distorts reality in the interest of a larger truth.

John L'Heureux

He reads every book in his home but it is not enough. The country boy craves stories. He devours every poem and fable in his school and library. Still he hungers. For stories.

Jennifer Lanthier

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Susan Sontag

An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.

Sidney Zion

Mort moved my ending to the beginning, took out all the adjectives, cut the whole thing in half, and made it one hundred percent better.'That's how it's done,' he said. Best writing lesson I ever had.

Anita Diamant

Upon descending our threaded words on the web by a steep and hazardous precipice of readers requires constant review.

MsConcerned

It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. “Fighters are sincere,” a fellow with the old pug’s syndrome said to me at a bar once as head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. “Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.” In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else.

A.J. Liebling

‎Theorists of journalism have long noted parallels to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in physics: by reporting on something, one subtly but irrevocably changes it.

Ben Yagoda

There is no greater hiding place for a secret than within the mind of a madman.

Alexander Ferrick

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it sho

Blaise Pascal

Author branding is the process of positioning an author as the center of attraction and influence, to be the preferred choice in a given theme, style, category, niche or genre

Bernard Kelvin Clive

Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!

Lewis Carroll

Anything can be good. Even Last Action Hero could’ve been good. There’s an idea somewhere in almost any movie : if you can find something that you love, then you can do it. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter how skilful you are...

Joss Whedon

Prose before hoes, muthafucka! I’ll be right over.

David Louden

Writing is a defence against boredom, but it's also a cure for melancholy.

Bohumil Hrabal

If rejections were cash, I'd be rich

Buffy Andrews

Writers are sponges. They absorb life, then squeeze and ring it out onto a page. Sometimes, if they squeeze too hard, they dry up. Not hard enough and they remain saturated, heavy and unpredictable, as they carry around a volume of ideas too great for their capacity.

Sarah Colliver

I write because I want express

Anamika Mishra

As a writer, self-doubt is useless. Get rid of it, rip it out like a weed and compost it.

Julie Rodelli

[W]hat is one to say of the writer who lies when he writes that he is lying?

Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

We were all journalists, professional truth-seekers, but one thing we knew about the truth that laymen were prone to disregard was that it need not be literal or factual; the unpredictable human personality was itself a fact.

Walter Kirn

For (Levi) Grossman, no books feel more like home than C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which provide the template for what he likes to read—and how he wants to write.

Joe Fassler

Some days I feel more like a scribe than a creator. I will have the major points fleshed out, but there is always a turn or two that I didn't see coming, or which came earlier than I expected it to, or not at all...

J. Neven-Pugh

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner.

Felicia Johnson

Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?

Charles Frazier

A book lives a new life every time it is read.

Brandon Sanderson

You enter a book as if you are setting out on a journey and, if it is a good book, you will be a different person when you reach the end.

Chloe Thurlow

Every reader wants the same thing: to open the cover of a book and watch the words explode like fireworks off the page.

Kim Lehman

I learned from the age of two or three, that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. It had been startling and disappointing for me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

Eudora Welty

Read obsessively. It will make you a better human and a better writer.

Pittacus Lore

If you don't love what you write, then nobody's going to enjoy reading it.

T.A. Uner

To find new, keep moving forward ...

Nanette L. Avery

A runner's high doesn't come from thinking about the end result, only of the moment, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time. It's the same for a writer ...

C.J. Heck

In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike.

Haruki Murakami

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details...

George Orwell

The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.

Gwenda Bond

1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure

Henry Miller

I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

Elmore Leonard

We do not propose any rules; we offer observations. "No right on red" is a rule. "Driving at high speed toward a brick wall usually ends badly" is an observation.

Howard Mittelmark

When we write with power and authenticity, it opens the door to our hearts and invites others in. When we're brave, we make others brave. Brave is good.

Lynda Cheldelin Fell

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves -- you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.

Ray Bradbury

I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.

James Tagg

A folktale without a moral is merely a whimsy.

Stephen Sondheim

Well, that's it." I said after we had waited for another five minutes and found ourselves still in a state of pleasantly welcome existence. "The ChronoGuard has shut itself down and time travel is as it should be: technically, logically, and theoretically...impossible." "Good thing, too," reply Landon. "It always made my head ache. In fact, I was thinking of doing self help book for science-fiction novelists eager to write about time travel. It would consist of a single word: Don't.

Jasper Fforde

....and on occasion I like to write in pencil, because I need to know that I can erase the words, even if I never do.

Bruce Black

I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

Sarah Ruhl

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detach

Raymond Chandler

Life is a sacred story.

Lailah Gifty Akita

I've decided I don't like books that end with 'The End'. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

Wayne Gerard Trotman

I live precariously through my characters - so I want them to be loved passionately, live vibrantly, love unconditionally. Make friends they would die for - Explore unimaginable possibilities from all warps of life. And to never forget those that held their hands when life got scary. Wiped their tears away after a broken heart. Helped them back on their feet when others let them down. I want my characters to have family and friends - just like mine :)

Patti Roberts

Some writers, notably Anton Chekov, argue that all characters must be admirable, because once we've looked at anyone deeply enough and understood their motivation we must identify with them rather than judge them.

Scarlett Thomas

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Writing Quotes - Page 5

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