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Writing Quotes
"You cannot write unless you write much."
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"I have received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage."
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"Write at the edges of the day."
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"Authors do not need to offer us the answers to such weighty questions such as how to live and prepare us to accept death. The aim of a writer's is to frame worldly questions that allow all readers too independently and jointly explore life-altering questions in a way that satisfies the fabric of thought corresponding to our respective times."
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"Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing."
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"Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?Y.C.: An unhappy childhood."
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"I'm not a writer, I just express in words!"
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"Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote."
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"When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float."
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"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer."
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"Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish this one short assignment."
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"With our writings, we can right the world."
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"And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book into the world, I would be writing about not-even-interestingly missing cups of cold camomile tea? And I thought, yup. Sounds about right.Happy Eighth birthday, blog."
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"Don't cry about it. Write about it."
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"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
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"I'm dazzled by your facility. In ten days you'll have written six stories! I don't understand it. I'm like one of those old aqueducts: there's so much rubbish cogging up the banks of my thought that it flows slowly, and only spills from the end of my pen drop by drop."
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"Then Diana puts too many murders into [her stories]. She says most of the time she doesn't know what to do with the people so she kills them off to get rid of them."
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"The longing to produce great inspirations didn't produce anything but more longing."
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"Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them."
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"Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain."
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"You never know what you will write until you write it."
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"I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession."
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"The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading."
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"That's why people use terms like flow or effortless to describe writing that they regard as really superb. They're not saying effortless in terms of it didn't seem like the writer spent any work. It simply requires no effort to read it - the same way listening to an incredible storyteller talk out loud requires no effort to pay attention. Whereas when you're bored, you're conscious of how much effort is required to pay attention."
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"To call yourself an author takes publishing one book. To call yourself an inspirational author is the work of a lifetime that requires being constantly kicked in the stomach, only to get back up on your feet and show the world how you survived it each time."
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"Writing is the great invention of the world."
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"One day I will write a book. An epitaph."
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"I was no longer able to hear the music that issues from a decent piece of prose."
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"London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
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"Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going."
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"Writing about personal thoughts and observations, subjective feelings and objective reality is a gateway experience that intensifies a person's level of consciousness. Every degree of increased consciousness can lead to increased knowledge of the world and self-understanding."
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"It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read."
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"I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it."
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"The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively."
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"Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books."
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"Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them."
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"The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp."
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"Once you are at the point where you can call yourself a writer, there's no turning back."
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"Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me."
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"I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head."
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"Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think."
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