Writing Quotes - Page 99

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work.Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book.

Bernard Schaffer

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt?

Ariel Gore

End with an image and don't explain.

Stanley Kunitz

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

Dorianne Laux

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

Abraham Lincoln

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

Anaïs Nin

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

Anne Lamott

If you haven't cried at least once while writing a chapter of your inspirational book, then you have to ask yourself if your're writing fiction.

Shannon L. Alder

Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him." Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded.

Warren Ellis

God pity the poor novelist.

Steven Millhauser

My life looked good on paper - where, in fact, almost all of it was being lived.

Martin Amis

It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo.

P.G. Wodehouse

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Franz Kafka

People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself.

John Gardner

Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.

Joseph Bruchac

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.

Umberto Eco

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote

Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?

T.C. Boyle

Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.

Winston S. Churchill

I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.

May Sarton

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

James N. Frey

Take that rage, put it on a page, take the page to the stage, blow the roof off the place.

The Script

The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be the same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one:ETC.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

Lyndsay Faye

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

Umberto Eco

All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Julio Cortázar

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

Julian Barnes

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.

Stendhal

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.

Alan Moore

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.

Tim O'Brien

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Neil Gaiman

When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.

Maya Angelou

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

If through no fault of his own the hero is crushed by a bulldozer in Act II, we are not impressed. Even though life is often like this—the absconding cashier on his way to Nicaragua is killed in a collision at the airport, the prominent statesman dies of a stroke in the midst of the negotiations he has spent years to bring about, the young lovers are drowned in a boating accident the day before their marriage—such events, the warp and woof of everyday life, seem irrelevant, meaningless. They are crude, undigested, unpurged bits of reality—to draw a metaphor from the late J. Edgar Hoover, they are “raw files.” But it is the function of great art to purge and give meaning to human suffering, and so we expect that if the hero is indeed crushed by a bulldozer in Act II there will be some reason for it, and not just some reason but a good one, one which makes sense in terms of the hero’s personality and action. In fact, we expect to be shown that he is in some way responsible for what happens to him.

Bernard Knox

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

Jean Cocteau

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

Horacio Quiroga

There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.

Alex de Campi

I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

Mary Oliver

You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty.

Jessica Mitford

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

Vladimir Nabokov

In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.

Lauren Groff

The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

Fran Lebowitz

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

Karl R. Popper

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

Frederik Pohl

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Italo Calvino

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?

Ernest Hemingway

There is a rule for fantasy writers: The more truth you mix in with a lie, the stronger it gets.

Diane Duane

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

Craig Ferguson

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

Dave Barry

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

Steven Millhauser

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

Samuel Johnson

Realism can break a writer's heart.

Salman Rushdie

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

John Steinbeck

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.

China Miéville

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

Erica Jong

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.

Thomas Wolfe

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Writing Quotes - Page 99

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