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Writing Quotes
"When I write sometimes I strike gold, sometimes I labor in vain and keep producing rubbish."
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"I am an Author a person that plays with words that dance in the minds of others."
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"A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience."
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"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."
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"The communication function of modern writers is akin to the ancient role fulfilled by tribal shamans. All writers ultimately perform a shamanistic role in society, their mythmaking voices speak to us from the underworld after their passage to the other side. Writers place themselves in a trance-like state where their unconscious mind dictates to them what to write."
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"What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?"
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"The best stories are like the best burgers: big, juicy, and messy."
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"Writing fiction is not a profession that leaves one well-disposed toward reading fiction. One starts out loving books and stories, and then one becomes jaded and increasingly hard to please. I read less and less fiction these days, finding the buzz and the joy I used to get from fiction in ever stranger works of non-fiction, or poetry."
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"I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers."
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"When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook-a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases."
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"I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down."
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"Good writing is a mirror of the mind where readers can see themselves again and again."
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"At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be."
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"Every other author may aspire to praise the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach."
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"The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn't mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater."
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"The point is, stories can be all lengths. Never underestimate the power of "less is more."
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"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works."
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"Writers wake up the world."
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"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better."
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"Writing is my joy, is my comfort zone, it strengthens my feeble knees and it frees my troubled heart."
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"Cath wanted to go back and rewrite every scene she'd ever written about Baz or Simon's chests. She'd written them flat and sharp and hard. Levi was all soft motion and breath, curves and warm hollows. Levi's chest was a living thing."
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"The profoundest thing writing teaches us is how much we contradict ourselves."
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"No one's book is perfect."
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"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world."
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"An older author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years."
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"Write like it matters, and it will."
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"The p'int of good writing is to know when to stop."
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"My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story."
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"Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."
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"I think this story-writing business is the foolishest yet," scoffed Marilla. "You'll get a pack of nonsense into your heads and waste time that should be put to your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse."
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"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."
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"You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander."
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"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."
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"A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life."
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"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."
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"I found the best thingI could dowas just to type awayat my own workand let the dyingdieas they always have."
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"You cannot write unless you write much."
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