top of page
.png){kind=small}
"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?"
Standard
Customized
More
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A writer's duty is to draw a picture that expresses more inner beauty, deeper anxiety, and more complex tragedy than a real character ever can."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Silence fell like a hammer made of feathers. It left holes in the shape of the sound of the sea."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd."
Author Name
Personal Development
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim."
Time
"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?"
Writing
"What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism."
Criticism
"That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old."
Life
"What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose."
Writing
"Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain."
Love
"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"
Education
"Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature."
Nature
"Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I'd spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn't matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit."
Life
"My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing."
Attention
bottom of page