top of page
"What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Writing quotes

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."

"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."

"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."

"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."

"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."
Explore more quotes by Isaac Asimov

"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."

"The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate."

"The thanks of a weak one are but of little value," he muttered, "but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way- and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite unseemly great."

"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."

"Have you ever come across something you couldn't explain?""Explain in what way? I could explain a ghost by saying, 'yes, that's a ghost.' I take it, that's not what you mean."

"Somewhere on the world was the Emperor's palace, set amid one hundred square miles of natural soil, rainbowed with flowers."

"It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotion."
bottom of page