"I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it."

Writing, First, Thinking

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"I was thinking about what I wanted to write next, after my first novel, and had decided that I wanted to write a story with a lot of strong female characters in it."

Exlpore more Writing quotes

"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

John Steinbeck, American Author

Writing, Loneliness, Communication, Story

"If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day."

Philip Pullman, British Writer

Writing, Day, Luck

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Plagiarism

"In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, First, Summer

"Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

Writing, Ego, Criticism, Success

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

Stephen King, American Author

Writing, Truth, Wisdom, Power, Regret

"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."

Mark Twain, American Author

Writing, Storytelling, Rules, Fiction

"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."

Stephen King, American Author

Writing, Discipline, Wisdom, Power, Truth

"Some people write letters, in the library."

Margaret Atwood, Canadian Novelist

Writing, Letters, Communication, Solitude, Reflection

"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."

Sara Sheridan, Scottish Author

Writing, Creativity, Story, Research, Imagination

Explore more quotes by Joan D. Vinge

"Everything born has to die, in order to make room for the future."

Future

"Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction."

Science

"Moon is also a naive native girl when she sets out for Carbuncle."

Moon

"Throughout the ages, stories with certain basic themes have recurred over and over, in widely disparate cultures; emerging like the goddess Venus from the sea of our unconscious."

Sea

"The futures and ultimate fates of the characters in The Snow Queen are profoundly changed by choices made in their own minds or hearts, as well as choices unexpectedly forced on them by things beyond their control."

Control

"Perhaps the thing that makes humans truly unique on Earth is that we are never satisfied with our situation; maybe that is what's taken us so far."

Earth

"Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear."

Fear

"Here was a fragment of Goddess myth that, through all its permutations, had somehow escaped being turned on its head. It was the perfect springboard for the sort of novel I wanted to write."

Being

"Humans may be the only creatures on Earth who spend significant time thinking about the fact that someday their lives will end."

Time

"The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight."

Society