Writing Quotes - Page 90

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

Sharon M. Draper

Writing for me is a kind of compulsion, so I don't think anyone could havemade me do it, or prevented me from doing it.

J.K. Rowling

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

All the time I'm not writing I feel like a criminal. It's horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It's much more relaxing to actually write.

Fran Lebowitz

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Mark Twain

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Arrogance kills creativity.

A.M. Riley

Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

Hilaire Belloc

Unicorns, dragons, witches may be creatures conjured up in dreams, but on the page their needs, joys, anguishes, and redemptions should be just as true as those of Madame Bovary or Martin Chuzzlewit.

Alberto Manguel

You've got to be smart enough to write and stupid enough not to think about all the things that might go wrong.

Sarah Gilbert

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.

Louise DeSalvo

To be a writer is to embrace rejection as a way of life.

Dana Stabenow

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

John Banville

But then why do we write if not to tackle the fears that others look to us to conquer?

J.F. Penn

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

Flannery O'Connor

I had forgotten that, and so many things. How could I put everything down on paper? It seemed impossible. No matter what, the majority of life would be left out of this story, this sliver of a version of the life I'd known. But I tried anyway.

Dave Eggers

Most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

Azar Nafisi

To write a novel, you need an iron butt.

Richard M. Nixon

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

Robert Bringhurst

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-centered characters who are never in trouble, never make mistakes, and always count their change as it is handed to them.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck.

Julio Cortázar

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washèd it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

Edmund Spenser

My writing is how I maintain.

Mark Salzman

The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

Anna Quindlen

And if you don't live, you have nothing to write about.

Maynard James Keenan

Write when you can't stop writing. Read when you stopped writing!

Robert Ahaness

You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing— your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.

David Foster Wallace

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

Jorge Luis Borges

[O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

Dorothy L. Sayers

The great thing about writing fiction is that you can do whatever the fuck you want, go as far as you are willing to go, and laugh at the people who take it seriously.

Richard P. Denney

For when all else is done, only words remain. Words endure.

Kate Mosse

All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories.

Neil Gaiman

You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.

Dennis Potter

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Alice Walker

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.

Edmond Jabès

Science fiction at its best should be crazy and dangerous, not sane and safe.

Paul Di Filippo

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

Richard Flanagan

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!

Nick Hornby

It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bills pile up. Then you think: "Well, I'm the sensitive type. I have to express myself." Do me a favor. Don't be so sensitive. Be tough. It will get you further along when you get rejected.Finally, you just do it because you happen to like it.

Natalie Goldberg

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.

Esther M. Friesner

And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog.

Neil Gaiman

It wouldn't happen... There hasn't been one publication by a monkey

Karl Pilkington

A good story should provoke discussion, debate, argument...and the occasional bar fight.

J. Michael Straczynski

An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.

Matthew Lewis

What really annoys me are the ones who write to say, I am doing your book for my final examinations and could you please tell me what the meaning of it is. I find it just so staggering--that you're supposed to explain the meaning of your book to some total stranger! If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

Margaret Drabble

You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich. A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery.

Nelson Algren

[I]f a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Jane Austen

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Joseph Conrad

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it.

Zadie Smith

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

Gore Vidal

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Gustave Flaubert

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it.

Bill Barich

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

Charles Caleb Colton

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Grant Morrison

And please God, grant me the wisdom to remember that I am writing for children, not golden stickers.

Rick Riordan

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Samuel Johnson

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Anne Lamott

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Writing Quotes - Page 90

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