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Writing Quotes
"Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer."
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"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."
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"I had no intention of pursuing either the characters or the setting further."
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"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost."
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"The bargain that yields mutual satisfaction is the only one that is apt to be repeated."
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"If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside."
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"All I really wanted to do was wildlife photography."
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"Writing of that caliber spoils you for any other kind of writing for awhile. But that's probably good."
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"Not only are Christians writing about Jesus, but also Communists, Jews, atheists and agnostics are taking up their pens to paint a portrait of Jesus."
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"I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days."
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"Especially in the last 10 years, the writing on animated shows has jumped by leaps and bounds."
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"I like the way Twitter makes one be more concise.It looks like someone is saying sometthing wise."
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"Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures."
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"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."
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"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter."
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"One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop."
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"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."
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"Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate."
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"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny - that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."
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"I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again."
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"And it is a folly to try to craft a novel for the screen, to write a novel with a screen contract in mind."
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"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
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"I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another."
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"The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything."
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"My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me."
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"Write what you want to write, don't fear about who will read it."
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"Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books."
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"Heinlein's Rules for Writers - Rule One: You Must Write. Rule Two: Finish What Your Start. Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order. Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market. Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold."
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"And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you."
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"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."
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