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Writing
- Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.
- You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.
- But it takes an awful long time to not write a book!
- Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
- Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
- From my experiences, writing never fails to write itself, as long as I am there to move it right along.
- Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
- The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
- I have made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
- All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
- Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
- An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
- Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
- Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
- Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton , Richelieu
- The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
- Please write again soon. Though my own life is filled with activity, letters encourage momentary escape into others lives and I come back to my own with greater contentment.
- Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey , 'A Woman of Independent Means'
- You ask me why I do not write something....I think one's feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.
- Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.
- After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity.
- George Ade , "Fables in Slang", 1899
- How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
- I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
- The cure for writer's cramp is writer's block.
- You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist.
- It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
- Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
- I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
- If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
- The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.
- 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.
- 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.
- About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
- Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography, but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
- Katherine Paterson , The Spying Heart, 1989
- The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
- Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
- Learn as much by writing as by reading.
- I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
- The first draft of anything is always shit
- True ease is writing comes from art, not chance. As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
- Words are like leaves; and wher they most abound, much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
- Writing is no trouble, you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity enough - it is the occurring which is difficult.
- "And lo, though I travel through the valley of the archetypes, I shall fear no evil, for I know that the author can't kill me off for at least another 150 pages, no matter how stupid or trite I become, or he ruins the book."
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