“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” - Stephen King
“The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.” - Ernest Hemingway
“I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you.
Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.”
― Madeleine L'Engle
“Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~” - Dr. Seuss
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” - Robert Frost
“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.” - Meg Cabot
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” - Sylvia Plath
“Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters.” - Neil Gaiman
“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.” - William Faulkner
"Dialogue is not just quotation. It is grimaces, pauses, adjustments of blouse buttons, doodles on a napkin, and crossings of legs." - Jerome Stern
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand." - George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947
A writer's mind seems to be situated partly in the solar plexus and partly in the head." - Ethel Wilson
“We are all story. That’s what my people say. From the moment we enter this physical reality until the moment we depart again as spirit, we are energy moving forward to the fullest possible expression of ourselves. “
~ Richard Wagamese, ~ One Story, One Song
"There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as do exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. " - Jessamyn West
"The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation." - Elias Canetti
"Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word wh
en a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague." - William Safire 'Great Rules of Writing'
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard
"It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if
you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories." - Paul Gallico
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. " - Vladimir Nabokov
"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space." - Orson Scott Card
For me, a page of good prose is where one hears the rain [and] the noise of battle"
John Cheever
"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov
"Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head." - Finding Forrester
"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As if those move easiest who have learn'd to dance." - Alexander Pope
"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes." - Agatha Christie
"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." - Ray Bradbury R.I.P. You will be missed.
"I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces." - Harold Ross
"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." - Enrique Jardiel Poncela
"If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad." - Lord Byron
"Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction." - Dylan Thomas letter to Vernon Watkins, March 1938
"When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can." - Samuel Lover, 'Handy Andy'
"Let me walk through the fields of paper
touching with my wand
dry stems and stunted
butterflies..."
-Denise Levertov, "a Walk through the Notebooks"
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say." - Anaïs Nin
"There's so much why out there... surround yourself with why not... It costs nothing to encourage artists. I've been trying to impart one simple lesson for 20 years. Anyone can do this... Tell people it's worth the shot. Just do it to see if it can be done, live a why not life." - Kevin Smith in 'Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell' (film is NSFW for strong language)
“I write for myself, for my own pleasure. And I want to be left alone to do it.” - J.D. Salinger
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” - W. Somerset Maugham
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” - Ray Bradbury
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"Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult." ~David Cronenberg
"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar." - E. B. White #Writ
"Writing is very much a playground - an artistic playground. It's the most fun thing I do." ~Shania Twain #writing #quotes
"The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing." ~David Sedaris #writing #quotes
"If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all." ~ Anne Tyler #writing #quotes
"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence." ~Samuel Beckett #writing #quotes
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"I have slept in twenty-six locations in the last seven months." In today's Daily News novelist Jami Attenberg details the sometimes-difficult attempt to maintain life as a writer.
"You can't just write for your own amusement." Rochelle Spencer
https://www.facebook.com/poetsandwriters?ref=ts
Emerging Blogger Pepi Ronalds on the art of interviewing:
"Of every twenty people I spoke to, I found one or two that I might interview. As I wrote the story, that number went down. Writing is so much about cutting. Paring it down makes it a better piece. But I always feel a little twinge of guilt as I cut characters and stories from my work. These aren’t imaginary characters I’m cutting. They’re real people."
https://www.facebook.com/MelbourneWritersFestival
“You know, it's hard work to write a book. I can't tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.” - Ellen DeGeneres
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“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” - Mark Twain
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“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” - Oscar Wilde
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” - Jack Kerouac
“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.” - Kurt Vonnegut