Writing Quotes - Page 85

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity...edit one more time!

C.K. Webb

Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.

Roman Payne

If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.

Louis L'Amour

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express, but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.

William Faulkner

The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.

Don DeLillo

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Joyce Carol Oates

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.

Christina Westover

I always tell my writing students that every good piece of writing begins with both a mystery and a love story. And that every single sentence must be a poem. And that economy is the key to all good writing. And that every character has to have a secret.

Silas House

Writing is both an act of power and surrender. Passion and discovery. It is a tug at your soul that continues to pull you forward, even as you go kicking and screaming.” (p.18)

Laraine Herring

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

T.S Eliot

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

James Lee Burke

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.

Thomas Hardy

A novel is like a dream in which everyone is you. They’re all parts of yourself.

Janet Fitch

I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.

Natalie Goldberg

Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when if feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.

Stephen King

I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.

Marvin Harris

And enigmatic smile is worth ten pages of dialog.

Connie Brockway

Listen to your inner self, it knows you best.

C. Elizabeth

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Jeffrey Eugenides

I write to believe in goodness.

Red Haircrow

But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.

Patrick Rothfuss

In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold;Alike fantastic, if too new, or old:Be not the first by whom the new are tried,Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

Alexander Pope

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

Ernest Hemingway

It's the writing that teaches you.

Isaac Asimov

I love working with my hands. My writing is rough, my paper bruised with ink stains.

Bauvard

It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The Sea

Caitlín R. Kiernan

That's typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.

Markus Zusak

Love hurts.Think back over romance novels you’ve loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.So don’t just make love, make anguish for your characters. As you structure a story, don’t satisfy your hero’s desires, thwart them. Make sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters doubts and despair. Make them earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them deserve it. Delay and disappointment charge situations and validate character growth. Misery accompanies love. It’s no accident that many of the stories we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that this time we’ll find a way out of the dark.Only if you let your characters get lost will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its halls, and find our way into daylight.

Damon Suede

Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.

Patricia T. O'Conner

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

Tennessee Williams

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

Gertrude Stein

I’ve learned to fall like the BJJ player, to protect the body through controlling the distribution of force by slapping the mat with hands open. With hands open. Hands open. Open. O Pen.

Cameron Conaway

Stories do not change, only the lives they live in do.

Cameron Conaway

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.", Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)

John Irving

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

Chinua Achebe

You know you’re writing well when you’re throwing good stuff into the wastebasket.

Ernest Hemingway

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

Meagan Spooner

...stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own ... you can't write a story until you've felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.

Angelica Banks

Reading feeds the soul, writing nourishes it!

Joanne McClean

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make

Antony Beevor

But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles.

Virginia Woolf

Destroy your life; then put it back together.You'll get great material, meet some fascinating characters and – side benefit – the skills you develop will give you greater compassion, insight and range with the people you create on the page – or run into off of it.

Jerry Stahl

You can only write what you know if you've lived, otherwise, you'll just be writing words.

Joseph Hunt

You better [start writing] now because you know how to write, and you have fingers, and you have this one life, and during this one life, you should put your words down, and make your voice heard, and then let others hear your voice. And the only way any of that’s going to happen is if you actually do it. People can’t read the thoughts in your head. They can only read the thoughts you put down, carefully and with great love, on the page.So you have to do it, goddamnit.

Dave Eggers

I hereby grant you permission to write crap. The more the better. Remember, crap makes the best fertilizer.

Pat Pattison

Ending a series is a difficult one .......where should a story that you have followed for so long end? When do you step away from the characters and let the readers decide their fate from there? When they can stand on their own is my only answer for that.

Shandy L. Kurth

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out

Charles Bukowski

I don't write stories, I write characters.

Bhavya Kaushik

This is the other secret that real artists know and wannabe writers don’t. When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight. When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.

Steven Pressfield

I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.

Don Roff

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of 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. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Lorrie Moore

Language allows us to reach out to people, to touch them with our innermost fears, hopes, disappointments, victories. To reach out to people we'll never meet.It's the greatest legacy you could ever leave your children or your loved ones:The history of how you felt.

Simon Van Booy

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

Gustave Flaubert

As it happened, all three of us turned out to be real writers--a coincidence almost too large to be termed mere coincidence in a society where literally tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of college students aspire to the writer's trade and where bare hundreds actually break through.

Stephen King

For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

James N. Frey

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.

P.G. Wodehouse

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

Tom Robbins

It seems as if I can only thing if I write my journal, it just connects the part of my head that is busy doing things with the part that is busy thinking about everything else. I know all these pepole are so busy because they love each other and me. We are a noisy crowd of love

Nancy E. Turner

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Writing Quotes - Page 85

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