"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories."

Writing, Story, Work, Identity

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"No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories."

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

"Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits."

Nora Roberts, American Author

Writing, Tools, Writer

"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

"I'm likely to stay here, pen in hand, until dusk comes and my writing melts into the twilight."

Fennel Hudson, British Author

Writing, Solitude, Creativity, Time

Explore more quotes by David Foster Wallace

"I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader."

Desire

"Why do prostitutes when they get straight always try and get so prim? It's like long-repressed librarian-ambitions come flooding out."

Society

"The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."

Society

"Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes."

Consequence

"I think I was very often bored as a child, but boredom is not what I knew it as-what I knew was that I worried a lot."

Childhood

"I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art."

Art

"It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell."

Depression

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

Empathy

"Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move."

Madness

"I mean, Tarantino is such a SHMUCK 90 percent of the time. But ten percent of the time, I've seen genius shining off the guy."

Film