Quotations on Reading and Writing
Quotations on Reading
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. ~ George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list. ~ Mary B. W. Tabor
One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books. ~ Graham Greene
Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath. ~ Jasper Fforde
I’m always baffled by people who never read books. The worlds they are missing. ~ Bruce W. Most
The more you read, the better you’re going to become as a storyteller. ~ Stan Lee
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book. ~ Roald Dahl
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it… If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. ~ James Baldwin
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ~ Cesar A. Cruz
A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters. ~ Angela Carter
The way the author’s imagination merges with the real world makes the reader see it in a different light. … What are you drawn to again and again? What seems to have a deeper meaning, in life as well as in fiction? ~ Jeff Vandermeer
I had this idea that the novel can change things. If you help make people see the injustice in the world and the corruption in the world, the world will become a better place. And my life, and also my novels, got a lot better when I let go of that idea and came around to a notion of a community of readers and writers, and that the service was not to Society with a capital S, but service to that community. ~ Jonathan Franzen
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. ~ Richard Wright, Black Boy
Very true, and even more true for us writers in the middle of creating a story. It’s an addiction that divorces us from the world around us.
A recent Yale University study found that readers live longer, healthier lives than nonreaders. The longer they read, the longer their lifespans. I think this is because they want to make sure they live to finish the book. ~ Bruce W. Most
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. ~ Bertrand Russell
There is a scientific reason that people enjoy solving mysteries. It’s the same reason we like stories at all. As humans, we have an innate need to understand events as being part of a larger narrative. We want life to be causal. We want to be able to use action to predict reaction. We want this because we need to believe that the events of our lives are not random. ~ Katherine Dykstra
I grew up on Agatha Christie whodunits and love letting my readers try to solve the mystery before the sleuth.
Every writer’s job is to give the reader what she wants in a way she doesn’t expect. ~ David Corbett
Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. ~ Virginia Woolf
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk. ~ Stephen King
You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. ~ Jen Campbell
What makes a really salable book that people grab onto is one that tells a story that causes you to feel something. ~ Tess Gerritsen
One trouble with developing speed-reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you’ve already finished it. ~ Franklin P. Jones
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.
~ Arnold Lobel
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one. ~ George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
~ P.J. O’Rourke
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin
One sure window into a person’s soul is his reading list. ~ Mary B. W. Tabor
One’s life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father’s library had not contained the right books. ~ Graham Greene
Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath. ~ Jasper Fforde
I’m always baffled by people who never read books. The worlds they are missing. ~ Bruce W. Most
The more you read, the better you’re going to become as a storyteller. ~ Stan Lee
I don’t care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book. ~ Roald Dahl
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them. ~ Ray Bradbury
The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it… If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world. ~ James Baldwin
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. ~ Cesar A. Cruz
A book is simply the container of an idea—like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters. ~ Angela Carter
The way the author’s imagination merges with the real world makes the reader see it in a different light. … What are you drawn to again and again? What seems to have a deeper meaning, in life as well as in fiction? ~ Jeff Vandermeer
I had this idea that the novel can change things. If you help make people see the injustice in the world and the corruption in the world, the world will become a better place. And my life, and also my novels, got a lot better when I let go of that idea and came around to a notion of a community of readers and writers, and that the service was not to Society with a capital S, but service to that community. ~ Jonathan Franzen
Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. ~ Richard Wright, Black Boy
Very true, and even more true for us writers in the middle of creating a story. It’s an addiction that divorces us from the world around us.
A recent Yale University study found that readers live longer, healthier lives than nonreaders. The longer they read, the longer their lifespans. I think this is because they want to make sure they live to finish the book. ~ Bruce W. Most
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. ~ Bertrand Russell
There is a scientific reason that people enjoy solving mysteries. It’s the same reason we like stories at all. As humans, we have an innate need to understand events as being part of a larger narrative. We want life to be causal. We want to be able to use action to predict reaction. We want this because we need to believe that the events of our lives are not random. ~ Katherine Dykstra
I grew up on Agatha Christie whodunits and love letting my readers try to solve the mystery before the sleuth.
Every writer’s job is to give the reader what she wants in a way she doesn’t expect. ~ David Corbett
Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. ~ Virginia Woolf
People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk. ~ Stephen King
You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. ~ Jen Campbell
What makes a really salable book that people grab onto is one that tells a story that causes you to feel something. ~ Tess Gerritsen
One trouble with developing speed-reading skills is that by the time you realize a book is boring you’ve already finished it. ~ Franklin P. Jones
I know one husband and wife who, whatever the official reasons given to the court for the breakup of their marriage, were really divorced because the husband believed that nobody ought to read while he was talking and the wife that nobody ought to talk while she was reading. ~ Vera Brittain
The books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are. ~ Salman Rushdie
I took a speed-reading course where you run your finger down the middle of the page and was able to read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It’s about Russia. ~ Woody Allen
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. ~ Agatha Christie
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out. ~ J.K. Rowling
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. ~ American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler
I remember proudly telling someone years ago that my first novel had just been published, and he responded, equally proudly, that he hadn’t read a book since high school twenty years before. ~ Bruce W. Most
Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they’ll know it too. ~ Esther Freud
Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books. ~ Richard Wright
My favorite books feel like a pair of cozy slippers. They’re warm and familiar, but they never cease to provide comfort. ~ Aytekin Tank, founder and CEO, JotForm
. . . one thing is universal: reading satisfies a hunger for story that’s almost as basic as our need for food and sleep. ~ crime novelist Karen Ellis
Writing stories satisfies the same hunger.
In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. ~ Anna Quindlen
I want to have as much fun as the reader. I want to be as shocked and thrilled and heartbroken as the reader. ~ Peter Heller on why he doesn’t like to know his storyline when he begins.
The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity, and this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish. ~ A. Edward Newton
Reading about another era is like armchair time travel—without the baggage. ~ C.J. Fosdick
I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else. ~ Neil Gaiman
Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. ~ John Waters
A new Pew Research Center study found that Americans 50 and older less likely to read books than younger people. Considering the distraction of social media among the young, I would have expected the reverse. ~ Bruce W. Most
If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers. ~ Doug Larson
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
The covers of this book are too far apart. ~ Ambrose Bierce
A team of researchers in Australia finds that growing up in a home with a sizable library enhances literacy, number-sense, and even technological know-how in later life. ~ Scientific American
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves—you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories. ~ Ray Bradbury
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs. ~ Christopher Hampton
Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic. ~ Jean Sibelius
All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction. ~ Steve Almond
The atmosphere of the place soothed her automatically; the rich lantern lights, the sheer scent of paper and leather, and the fact that everywhere she looked, there were books, books, beautiful books. ~ Genevieve Cogman, The Invisible Library
It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know, how sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the close of a two-years’ imaginative task; or how an author feels as if he were dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. ~ Charles Dickens
Reading is very creative—it’s not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it. ~ New Zealand author Margaret Mahy
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t. ~ Mark Twain
As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books. ~ Maurice Sendak
Quotations on Writing
New Year’s Day. A fresh start. A new chapter in life waiting to be written. New questions to be asked, embraced, and loved. Answers to be discovered and then lived in this transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream, pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change. ~ Sarah Ban Breathnach
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
The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. ~ Mary Heaton Vorse
I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork. ~ Peter de Vries.
I have a shirt with this quote.
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous. ~ Robert Benchley
If you really come down to any large story that interests people—holds the attention for a considerable time . . . human stories are practically always about one thing, aren’t they? Death. The inevitability of death. ~ J. R. R. Tolkien
The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. ~ unknown
How many mystery writers does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to screw the bulb almost all the way in, and one to give a surprising twist at the end. ~ unknown
From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. ~ Winston Churchill
I wrote a few children’s books. Not on purpose. ~ Steven Wright
I used to be embarrassed because I was just a comic-book writer while other people were building bridges or going on to medical careers. And then I began to realize: entertainment is one of the most important things in people’s lives. Without it they might go off the deep end. I feel that if you’re able to entertain people, you’re doing a good thing. ~ Stan Lee
I really ought to stop writing novels and try to fail at something more realistic, like cliff diving. ~ Brendan Murphy in Gary Reilly’s Pickup at Union Station
I’m thinking of rock climbing.
If I don’t write, I hate myself. Simple as that. My life is out of balance. ~ Harlan Coben
I don’t hate myself when I don’t write, but as my wife can attest, I sure get grumpy.
The kind of fiction I write is about sending depth charges down into the inner workings of the human mind and laying bare what makes people tick ~ Novelist M. J. Hyland
Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone. ~ Paul Tillich
As an author, I love the solitude. It’s my characters who suffer the loneliness.
Writing a book is not for the faint of heart. Writing a book is hard work. It is lonely at times. ~ Author and doctor Beth Ricanati
What if we all are characters in a book? What if when you forget what you were going to say, it's the author backspacing. ~ Rotten Ecards
Ahh, that explains why I forget so easily these days.
Writers don’t dream of writing. Writers write. ~ Vijay Seshadri
It seems that perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. ~ French writer and poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Perfect advice for editing our writing. Though of course we never truly attain perfection.
There are three rules for novel writing. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. ~ Somerset Maugham
Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters. ~ Neil Gaiman
Action expresses priorities. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Good advice for our characters
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. ~ Gene Fowler
Well, that explains my bloody forehead.
People standing around, over drinks, talking about writing, isn’t writing. Writing is when you go off on your own, close the door and fight it out with the blank screen or paper ~ John McPhee
The society of dead authors has this advantage over that of the living: they never flatter us to our faces, nor slander us behind our backs, nor intrude upon our privacy, nor quit their shelves until we take them down. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
I’m not in a hurry to reach this stage of my writing career.
We write to taste life twice. ~ Anais Nin
Can’t think of a better reason to write.
I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles. ~ Children’s author Shannon Hale
If writing is important to you, then you need to do two key things: Make time to write and allow yourself to write badly. ~ Are You on Track with Your 2019 Writing Goals?
I don’t always make as much time to write as I should, but by gosh, my early drafts proudly achieve the write badly goal.
There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough. ~ William Zinsser
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door. ~ From Knock, a 1948 sci-fi short story by Fredric Brown.
Do opening lines get any better than that?
As a novelist, I don’t write about the ways I’ve personally navigated a challenging situation; instead, I imagine a situation that might result in a familiar wound or pose a similar challenge. ~ Jennifer Zobair
Creativity isn’t seeing what no one else sees; it’s seeing what anyone else would see —if only they were looking. ~ writing teacher Steven James
Honesty in writing is key for the writer and the reader. When a writer is willing to be open … then readers feel close to the work and welcomed inside by the author. ~ Amy Sue Nathan, writing coach, editor and author of The Glass Wives
You can, of course, write to inspire others . . . but most importantly, you must write to inspire yourself. ~ Jessica Swan
If there weren’t so many interesting conversations taking place inside my head, I might venture to speak out loud. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich
The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself. ~ William Faulkner
I shy away from ‘only thing’ statements, but still excellent advice.
I am disciplined—that’s my writing. I have a fast writing pace—also just writing. I was educated (nine year of Catholic school) by the nuns. Nobody lays a foundation of discipline like the Sisters. Trust me on this. ~ Nora Roberts
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. ~ Sylvia Plath
Write without restraint. It’s important to not censor yourself. People will censor the sh*t out of you . . . and there’s more truth in fiction than there is in nonfiction. You have to be committed to that truth. ~ Walter Mosely
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it. ~ fantasy writer Terry Pratchett
I never had a plan to be a fiction writer. It’s something that happened to me. Sometimes I think maybe it was my spectacular mid-life crisis. Some people buy expensive cars, and I wrote a novel. ~ Deborah Harkness
Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who went into labor and began to yell, Couldn’t! Wouldn’t! Shouldn’t! Didn’t! Can’t!? She was having contractions.
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page. ~ Jodie Picoult
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison.
I get a lot of letters from people. They say: ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it. ~ Ruth Rendell
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind . . . Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there. ~ On Writing Well by William Zinsser
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was 12. So, I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this. ~ Ray Bradbury
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. ~ Albert Camus
The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere. ~ S.J. Perelman
Writing is a matter of trusting your heart and gut more than logic, because people aren’t logical. Characters should do crazy things because that’s real life and I think that’s what we should write about. ~ Tess Gerritsen
I write every day. It’s just my job, and I’m very fortunate to love my job. Not everyone is half as lucky to be able to make their living doing something they love. ~ Nora Roberts
Frequently I will write chapters that I end up having to ditch. And they might be beautifully crafted, they might contain things I’m really proud of, but you have to be ruthless. ~ Jojo Moyes
For the past year I’ve been brainstorming a short play. I have a bunch of funny, wonderful parts but no idea whether the parts belong to a bicycle, a car, or a microwave. ~ Bruce W. Most
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it. ~ Gene Wolfe
Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. ~ Toni Morrison
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule. ~ Herman Wouk
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~ E.L. Doctorow
I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. ~ Albert Camus, The Plague
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
I’m a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues. ~ Chelsea Cain
I hate the new word processors that want to tell you, as you’re typing, that you made a mistake. I have to turn off all that crap. It’s like, shut up—I’m thinking now. I will worry about that sort of error later. I’m a human being. I can still read this, even though it’s wrong. You stupid machine, the fact that you can’t is irrelevant to me. ~ Ellen Ullman
Murder is always a mistake—one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner. ~ Oscar Wilde
The worst [writing advice] is probably Write what you know. ~ Lee Child
The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page. ~ Anne Enright
Writing a mystery story is like playing a game of chess with a thousand unknown opponents. ~ George Dyer
Perfectionism is the bane of many a writer’s existence. Nothing is more painful than agonizing over every word. (Okay, having a tooth pulled is. But we get painkiller for that.) ~ Charlotte R Dixon
When you start with the first line, you let the story ride. Then, (after writing for a time) you bump into what’s on your heart. ~ Peter Heller
‘Write what you know.’ I’m not here to argue that’s bad or incorrect advice. I’m here to argue that you know a lot more than you think you do. ~ Jan Christensen
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. ~ Pablo Picasso
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. ~ Douglas Adams
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. ~ Thomas Wolfe
Feels about right for the times.
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. ~ Mark Twain
Creativity is intelligence having fun. ~ Albert Einstein
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. ~ Quentin Crisp
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does. ~ Groucho Marx
Everybody is the hero of their own story. ~ George R.R. Martin
Character is the best plot. ~ Brad Meltzer
There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer. When asked to define great he said, I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger! He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. ~ Poet and mystery writer C. Day-Lewis
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene
It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing. ~ Truman Capote
You can’t fake it. Bad writing is a gift. ~ Richard Le Gallienne
Noir is our way of saying howdy to the dark side without going there to live. ~ Joe R. Lansdale
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison.
I get a lot of letters from people. They say: ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it. ~ Ruth Rendell
Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds—the writer is always slightly behind . . . Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there. ~ On Writing Well by William Zinsser
My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was 12. So, I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this. ~ Ray Bradbury
Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth. ~ Albert Camus
The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere. ~ S.J. Perelman
Writing is a matter of trusting your heart and gut more than logic, because people aren’t logical. Characters should do crazy things because that’s real life and I think that’s what we should write about. ~ Tess Gerritsen
I write every day. It’s just my job, and I’m very fortunate to love my job. Not everyone is half as lucky to be able to make their living doing something they love. ~ Nora Roberts
Frequently I will write chapters that I end up having to ditch. And they might be beautifully crafted, they might contain things I’m really proud of, but you have to be ruthless. ~ Jojo Moyes
For the past year I’ve been brainstorming a short play. I have a bunch of funny, wonderful parts but no idea whether the parts belong to a bicycle, a car, or a microwave. ~ Bruce W. Most
All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it. ~ Gene Wolfe
Make up a story… For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. ~ Toni Morrison
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule. ~ Herman Wouk
Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. ~ E.L. Doctorow
I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. ~ Albert Camus, The Plague
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards. ~ Robert A. Heinlein
I’m a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues. ~ Chelsea Cain
I hate the new word processors that want to tell you, as you’re typing, that you made a mistake. I have to turn off all that crap. It’s like, shut up—I’m thinking now. I will worry about that sort of error later. I’m a human being. I can still read this, even though it’s wrong. You stupid machine, the fact that you can’t is irrelevant to me. ~ Ellen Ullman
Murder is always a mistake—one should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner. ~ Oscar Wilde
The worst [writing advice] is probably Write what you know. ~ Lee Child
The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page. ~ Anne Enright
Writing a mystery story is like playing a game of chess with a thousand unknown opponents. ~ George Dyer
Perfectionism is the bane of many a writer’s existence. Nothing is more painful than agonizing over every word. (Okay, having a tooth pulled is. But we get painkiller for that.) ~ Charlotte R Dixon
When you start with the first line, you let the story ride. Then, (after writing for a time) you bump into what’s on your heart. ~ Peter Heller
‘Write what you know.’ I’m not here to argue that’s bad or incorrect advice. I’m here to argue that you know a lot more than you think you do. ~ Jan Christensen
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. ~ Pablo Picasso
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. ~ Douglas Adams
The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. ~ Thomas Wolfe
Feels about right for the times.
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. ~ Mark Twain
Creativity is intelligence having fun. ~ Albert Einstein
An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. ~ Quentin Crisp
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does. ~ Groucho Marx
Everybody is the hero of their own story. ~ George R.R. Martin
Character is the best plot. ~ Brad Meltzer
There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer. When asked to define great he said, I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger! He now works for Microsoft, writing error messages.
We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. ~ Poet and mystery writer C. Day-Lewis
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene
It takes a lot of bad writing to get to a little good writing. ~ Truman Capote
You can’t fake it. Bad writing is a gift. ~ Richard Le Gallienne
Noir is our way of saying howdy to the dark side without going there to live. ~ Joe R. Lansdale
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Not to stir up old literary debates, but . . . I’m a sucker for genre fiction. Which is the same thing as literary fiction, but with a plot. ~ Crime writer Lyndsay Faye
Best way to begin [a book] is with notebook or diary. Blindfold the computer; send the phone for a walk in the park. ~ Legendary editor Lewis H. Lapham
If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen. ~ Dashiell Hammett
When I start a new book, I feel like I walk into town and say, ‘What has everybody been up to?’ And they tell me. ~ Terry Shames on the magic of how background characters find their way into her mysteries
When a long book succeeds, the writer and reader are not just having an affair; they are married. ~ Stephen King
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ~ Albert Einstein
As a writer of mysteries, I couldn’t agree more
I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. ~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I learned a new old word today every professional writer should learn: scribblemania. Meaning a compulsion for writing. It’s associated with the Brontë sisters. Wrote Charlotte: I am just going to write because I cannot help it. Today we call that an addiction. ~ Bruce W. Most
Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed. ~ J.K. Rowling
Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to shortchange the Muse. It cannot be done. You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal. ~ William S. Burroughs
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players. I have 10 or so, and that’s a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them. ~ Gore Vidal
Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything. ~ Stephen King
On some level we all have our crimes, those we inflict and those we endure. ~ Ron Rash
Crime and punishment is a central myth, one that we’re hardwired for. It continues to have a power. You know, novels are about when things don’t go right. ~ Ron Rash
I view my role as witness, not advocate. I respect my readers too much to tell them what and how they should think. ~ Ron Rash
The idea is simply that a crime is more compelling when we own a piece of it ourselves. A criminal is more relatable and more dangerous when he or she—but for the grace of God—is you or me. ~ John Galligan
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. ~ Henry David Thoreau
A real writer is someone who can’t help it. ~ Max Evans
Ain’t that the truth
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. ~ Stephen King
Only bad writers think that their work is really good. ~ Anne Enright
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work. ~ Pearl S. Buck
I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ~ J.K. Rowling
Let’s face it, writing is hell. ~ William Styron
Not every day. Some days are heaven. But I’d like fewer visits to hell.
Don’t stop writing. You are a literary shark. If you stop writing, you die. ~ Michael Bracken
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. ~ Isaac Asimov
I can write crime fiction, but I’m in awe of scifi writers
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society. ~ Mark Twain
A protagonist and his story can only be as intellectually fascinating and emotionally compelling as the forces of antagonism make them. ~ Robert McKee
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. ~ Terry Pratchett
A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing. ~ Don Roff
Amen.
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. ~ Howard Nemerov
I love this.
All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories. ~ Neil Gaiman
To me, murder seems to be the ultimate form of social distancing. ~ J. P. Pulkkinen, Finnish crime novelist
You have to go where the book leads you. ~ Stephen King
When you write—explode—fly apart—disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite. ~ Ray Bradbury
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction ~ Virginia Woolf
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book. ~ Gertrude Stein
Last, but not least, avoid clichés like the plague. ~ William Safire
That’s beating a dead horse in my book.
I haven’t stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various. ~ Irwin Shaw
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found. ~ Elizabeth Bowen
No wonder I’m always searching in the dark forest.
If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. ~ Toni Morrison
The prose as such has to be singing the song the story is telling. ~ Leonard Michaels
Fiction is lies; we’re writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it. ~ George R. R. Martin
Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don’t see any. ~ Orson Scott Card
Sometimes the writing portion is like wading through mud—it smells bad, you're miserable, and it feels like there's something crawling up your pant leg. ~ Alessandra Torre
Maybe that’s why my wife won’t get near me when I’m writing.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. ~ Elmore Leonard
When the mind is being put to creative use, the sense and sensation of freedom is off the charts. The writing doesn’t get easier, but the work becomes play. ~ Lewis H. Lapham
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~ Maya Angelou
This is why many of us can’t quit writing
Write every day without fail, even if it’s only for half an hour, even if you’re savagely hungover and your grandmother has just fallen out of a third-story window. ~ Tom Robbins
I am erratic about this. Maybe I need to be hungover more often.
You need to remember this. The cat sat on the mat. That’s not a story. But the cat sat on a dog’s mat. Now that’s a story. ~ John le Carré
What about a cat sitting on my computer when I’m trying to write?
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way. ~ Ernest Hemingway
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. ~ Truman Capote
I just wish the scissors wouldn’t chop up so much of my pencil work.
People don’t know they want to become an author until they meet me. ~ Lucas J. Robak
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone. ~ Erica Jong
I never show anyone my early drafts. I don’t even like to look at them.
Good action should tell you things about your characters. An action scene has to change (the characters) or the world around them, and the scene itself should tell a story. ~ film maker Gareth Evans
I think it’s a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as storytelling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers. ~ Piers Anthony
That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones. ~ Raymond Carver
My wife complains she can’t keep track of the characters in my mysteries. Do you hear that from readers? I think she’s really objecting to all my characters who end up dead. ~ Bruce W. Most
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. ~ Robert Frost
It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. ~ P.D. James
Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. ~ Flannery O’Connor
[Famed photographer Annie] Leibovitz’s advice for allowing others to see who people really are, is not to set her subjects at ease, but to put them on edge. What great advice that is for writers trying to captivate and hold a reader’s interest because we know that if our characters are at ease, the story can quickly become boring. ~ Lee McKenzie
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. ~ Virginia Woolf
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking. ~ Joan Didion
Why do I have to write so many drafts, so slowly, to find out what I’m thinking?
Writing is a gambler’s profession. There is no guarantee of anything. You can put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, invest a great deal of emotional energy, and nothing may come out of it. There are no guarantees. So, unless one is fairly committed and willing to make that investment, don’t do it. ~ Margaret Atwood
To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. ~ Allen Ginsberg
Are you a slow writer? I’m a dreadfully slow. When I set out to write a contemporary mystery it’s a historical by the time I finish. ~ Bruce W. Most
The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labor. ~ Shatrujeet Nath
Only one year?
My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. ~ Cory Doctorow
Amen
It takes a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else. ~ Lawrence Durrell
I’ve never thought of myself as neurotic, but by this definition maybe I am.
I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love. ~ Anita Diamant
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~ Ernest Hemingway
I write to be the characters that I am not. ~ Joss Whedon
A good antidote to the advice to write only what you know.
I am a writer. If I seem cold, it’s because I am surrounded by drafts. ~ Unknown Author
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. ~ Anita Shreve
I have a box of rejection slips from when I was a teenager, some quite colorful. I considered framing them as art.
Imaginary friends. They truly are the heart of fiction. ~ Leslie Budewitz
Do your characters talk to you? Mine chatter constantly, squabble among themselves, demand my attention, take up residence and refuse to move out until I finish their story. ~ Bruce W. Most
Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that, Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. ~ Stephen King on adverbs
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around. ~ Ken Kesey
What makes a story universal is its specificity. ~ Jesse Kellerman
Do you have self-doubt? Guess what? You’re probably a writer. No, I take that back; you’re probably human. ~ Melissa Bowersock
Sometimes I think I threw one too many balls in the air, and I rather wish that instead of juggling 12 story lines, I were juggling 6. ~ George R.R. Martin
I enjoyed his Game of Throne novels, but each book was 200 pages too long.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. ~ Calvin Trillin
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. ~ Jane Yolen
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Everyone is grist for a writer.
Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about. ~ Marlon James
Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to quit. You get kicked down. You come up swinging. You keep going. Either you are committed to it, or you aren’t. ~ Kameron Hurley
My old writing group called the first draft the vomit draft. Throw up on the page and clean it up later. First drafts are not pretty. Mine look as if a war has been committed. ~ Cheryl Sterling
There’s this cult of the opening sentence, as if crafting a perfect first line is the only key to writing a best-selling novel. Here’s my take: it isn’t. ~ Author/editor Scott McCormick
A professional writer is just an amateur writer who didn’t give up. ~ Original source unknown
I don’t like to start something unless I have an idea of how it’s going to finish. That doesn’t mean it’ll finish that way. I just got to have a life preserver, like this is how it might go. ~ Shawn S.A. Cosby
Artists are here to disturb the peace. ~ James Baldwin
If you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either. ~ Meg Cabot
Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t. It’s like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating. ~ Colson Whitehead
When I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. ~ Raymond Chandler
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. ~ Philip Guedalla
I’ve never been a fast writer, and I’ve never been good with deadlines. ~ George R.R. Martin Who woulda thunk?
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. ~ Aldous Huxley
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers. ~ Irvin S. Cobb
And here I thought all us writers went into this insane endeavor for the money.
If Moses were alive today, he’d come down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and spend the next five years trying to get them published. ~ Anonymous
He could self-publish.
Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’ ~ Jef Mallett
Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material. ~ Garrison Keillor
I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget–no murder before chapter five.’ ~ Shirley Jackson
One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. ~ Lawrence Block
Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood. ~ Leslie Gordon Barnard
Get that draft counter going. Remove a comma and then print out another copy—that’s another draft right there. Do this enough times and you can really get those numbers up, which will come in handy if someone challenges you to a draft-off. When the ref blows the whistle and your opponent goes, 26 drafts!, you’ll bust out with 216! and send ’em to the mat. ~ Colson Whitehead
Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot. ~ Leigh Brackett
People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it. ~ R.L. Stine
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. ~ Annie Dillard
The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
For me, writing a book is often a quest to discover the end. But if her advice works for you, go for it. Far be it for me to disagree with Joyce Carol Oates.
From my close observation of writers, they fall into two groups: those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. ~ Isaac Asimov
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein
Any coincidence is worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence. ~ Agatha Christie
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. ~ Catherine Drinker Brown
I’d probably substitute the phrase so exhilarating.
When the mind is being put to creative use, the sense and sensation of freedom is off the charts. The writing doesn’t get easier, but the work becomes play. ~ Lewis H. Lapham
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. ~ Maya Angelou
This is why many of us can’t quit writing
Write every day without fail, even if it’s only for half an hour, even if you’re savagely hungover and your grandmother has just fallen out of a third-story window. ~ Tom Robbins
I am erratic about this. Maybe I need to be hungover more often.
You need to remember this. The cat sat on the mat. That’s not a story. But the cat sat on a dog’s mat. Now that’s a story. ~ John le Carré
What about a cat sitting on my computer when I’m trying to write?
It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way. ~ Ernest Hemingway
I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil. ~ Truman Capote
I just wish the scissors wouldn’t chop up so much of my pencil work.
People don’t know they want to become an author until they meet me. ~ Lucas J. Robak
All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you’ll never write a line. That’s why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone. ~ Erica Jong
I never show anyone my early drafts. I don’t even like to look at them.
Good action should tell you things about your characters. An action scene has to change (the characters) or the world around them, and the scene itself should tell a story. ~ film maker Gareth Evans
I think it’s a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as storytelling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers. ~ Piers Anthony
That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones. ~ Raymond Carver
My wife complains she can’t keep track of the characters in my mysteries. Do you hear that from readers? I think she’s really objecting to all my characters who end up dead. ~ Bruce W. Most
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. ~ Robert Frost
It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style. ~ P.D. James
Everywhere I go, I’m asked if the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. ~ Flannery O’Connor
[Famed photographer Annie] Leibovitz’s advice for allowing others to see who people really are, is not to set her subjects at ease, but to put them on edge. What great advice that is for writers trying to captivate and hold a reader’s interest because we know that if our characters are at ease, the story can quickly become boring. ~ Lee McKenzie
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works. ~ Virginia Woolf
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking. ~ Joan Didion
Why do I have to write so many drafts, so slowly, to find out what I’m thinking?
Writing is a gambler’s profession. There is no guarantee of anything. You can put in a lot of time, a lot of effort, invest a great deal of emotional energy, and nothing may come out of it. There are no guarantees. So, unless one is fairly committed and willing to make that investment, don’t do it. ~ Margaret Atwood
To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. ~ Allen Ginsberg
Are you a slow writer? I’m a dreadfully slow. When I set out to write a contemporary mystery it’s a historical by the time I finish. ~ Bruce W. Most
The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labor. ~ Shatrujeet Nath
Only one year?
My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. ~ Cory Doctorow
Amen
It takes a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you’d do something else. ~ Lawrence Durrell
I’ve never thought of myself as neurotic, but by this definition maybe I am.
I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love. ~ Anita Diamant
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master. ~ Ernest Hemingway
I write to be the characters that I am not. ~ Joss Whedon
A good antidote to the advice to write only what you know.
I am a writer. If I seem cold, it’s because I am surrounded by drafts. ~ Unknown Author
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don’t consider it rejected. Consider that you’ve addressed it ‘to the editor who can appreciate my work’ and it has simply come back stamped ‘Not at this address.’ Just keep looking for the right address. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
To ward off a feeling of failure, she joked that she could wallpaper her bathroom with rejection slips, which she chose not to see as messages to stop, but rather as tickets to the game. ~ Anita Shreve
I have a box of rejection slips from when I was a teenager, some quite colorful. I considered framing them as art.
Imaginary friends. They truly are the heart of fiction. ~ Leslie Budewitz
Do your characters talk to you? Mine chatter constantly, squabble among themselves, demand my attention, take up residence and refuse to move out until I finish their story. ~ Bruce W. Most
Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that, Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him. ~ Stephen King on adverbs
When Shakespeare was writing, he wasn’t writing for stuff to lie on the page; it was supposed to get up and move around. ~ Ken Kesey
What makes a story universal is its specificity. ~ Jesse Kellerman
Do you have self-doubt? Guess what? You’re probably a writer. No, I take that back; you’re probably human. ~ Melissa Bowersock
Sometimes I think I threw one too many balls in the air, and I rather wish that instead of juggling 12 story lines, I were juggling 6. ~ George R.R. Martin
I enjoyed his Game of Throne novels, but each book was 200 pages too long.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘whom’ is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. ~ Calvin Trillin
Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up. ~ Jane Yolen
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Everyone is grist for a writer.
Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about. ~ Marlon James
Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to quit. You get kicked down. You come up swinging. You keep going. Either you are committed to it, or you aren’t. ~ Kameron Hurley
My old writing group called the first draft the vomit draft. Throw up on the page and clean it up later. First drafts are not pretty. Mine look as if a war has been committed. ~ Cheryl Sterling
There’s this cult of the opening sentence, as if crafting a perfect first line is the only key to writing a best-selling novel. Here’s my take: it isn’t. ~ Author/editor Scott McCormick
A professional writer is just an amateur writer who didn’t give up. ~ Original source unknown
I don’t like to start something unless I have an idea of how it’s going to finish. That doesn’t mean it’ll finish that way. I just got to have a life preserver, like this is how it might go. ~ Shawn S.A. Cosby
Artists are here to disturb the peace. ~ James Baldwin
If you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either. ~ Meg Cabot
Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t. It’s like washing the dishes two days later instead of right after you finish eating. ~ Colson Whitehead
When I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have. ~ Raymond Chandler
The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds. ~ Philip Guedalla
I’ve never been a fast writer, and I’ve never been good with deadlines. ~ George R.R. Martin Who woulda thunk?
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. ~ Aldous Huxley
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers. ~ Irvin S. Cobb
And here I thought all us writers went into this insane endeavor for the money.
If Moses were alive today, he’d come down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and spend the next five years trying to get them published. ~ Anonymous
He could self-publish.
Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’ ~ Jef Mallett
Bad things don’t happen to writers; it’s all material. ~ Garrison Keillor
I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget–no murder before chapter five.’ ~ Shirley Jackson
One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. ~ Lawrence Block
Don’t expect the puppets of your mind to become the people of your story. If they are not realities in your own mind, there is no mysterious alchemy in ink and paper that will turn wooden figures into flesh and blood. ~ Leslie Gordon Barnard
Get that draft counter going. Remove a comma and then print out another copy—that’s another draft right there. Do this enough times and you can really get those numbers up, which will come in handy if someone challenges you to a draft-off. When the ref blows the whistle and your opponent goes, 26 drafts!, you’ll bust out with 216! and send ’em to the mat. ~ Colson Whitehead
Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot. ~ Leigh Brackett
People say, ‘What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?’ I say, they don’t really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they’re gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it. ~ R.L. Stine
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. ~ Annie Dillard
The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
For me, writing a book is often a quest to discover the end. But if her advice works for you, go for it. Far be it for me to disagree with Joyce Carol Oates.
From my close observation of writers, they fall into two groups: those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review. ~ Isaac Asimov
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. ~ Albert Einstein
Any coincidence is worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence. ~ Agatha Christie
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word. ~ Catherine Drinker Brown
I’d probably substitute the phrase so exhilarating.
To be able to write a novel you have to be willing to fall out of life for 1 year and not let anyone sway you. ~ Ksenia Anske
I wish I could write a novel in a year.
The profession of book-writing makes horse-racing seem like a solid, stable business. ~ John Steinbeck.
You don’t actually have to write anything until you’ve thought it out. This is an enormous relief, and you can sit there searching for the point at which the story becomes a toboggan and starts to slide. ~ Marie de Nervaud
Whether a character in your novel is full of choler, bile, phlegm, blood or plain old buffalo chips, the fire of life is in there, too, as long as that character lives. ~ James Alexander Thom
It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly. ~ C. J. Cherryh
Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer. ~ Ray Bradbury
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. ~ Russell Baker
I agree with the idea I was not fit for anything but writing, but I disagree with the notion that writing is not real work. It’s damn hard.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
There’s no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. ~ Maya Angelou
We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings. … Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. ~ John Updike
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. ~ Thomas Mann
Sounds counterintuitive, but he’s right. We writers agonize over every word, every sentence, every scene, every punctuation mark.
Write in any way that works for you. Write in a tuxedo or in the shower. ~ John Gardner
Does a tuxedo in the shower make a doubly better book?
I still have a writing session every day. It’s another thing that organizes your mind. The coffee goes here. The pad goes here. The notes go here. My writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else. The writing is such an ordeal. That sustains me. – Jerry Seinfeld
If something isn’t working, if you have a story that you’ve built and it’s blocked and you can’t figure it out, take your favorite scene, or your very best idea or set-piece, and cut it. It’s brutal, but sometimes inevitable. ~ Joss Whedon
The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart
I’ve often compared murder mysteries to a magician’s show. What you think you see and what’s really going behind the scenes are two different things.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. ~ Aldous Huxley
I’ve come to believe that never making mistakes is impossible, catching them all is a dream, and the only way to prevent them is to leave the paper blank. Since I’m not willing to do that, I’m looking forward to more years of hunting and correcting. I tell myself it’s a lively pursuit, with almost the suspense of a silent, nearly motionless sport. ~ Thomas Perry on finding errors in books.
How many mystery writers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two. One to change the bulb and one to give it an unexpected twist at the end.
A good friend will help you move, but a true friend will help you move a body. ~ Steven J. Daniels, Weeds in The Garden of Love
There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer. ~ Barbara Kingsolver
Write . . . as if you’ll never be read. That way you’ll be sure to tell the truth. ~ Lori Lansens
Writing is sweat and drudgery most of the time. And you have to love it in order to endure the solitude and the discipline. ~ Peter Benchley, author of Jaws
Writer’s block is just a warning that you’re doing the wrong thing. ~ Ray Bradbury
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. ~ John le Carre
I confess, I’d be so thrilled that Hollywood wanted to turn one of my mysteries into a movie, I’d probably be happy even if it were turned into cat food.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them—without a thought about publication—and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside. ~ Anne Tyler
I’d recommend this to even us more seasoned writers.
I just give myself permission to suck. I delete about 90 percent of my first drafts, so it doesn’t really matter much if on a particular day I write beautiful and brilliant prose that will stick in the minds of my readers forever, because there’s a 90 percent chance I’m just going to delete whatever I write anyway. I find this hugely liberating. ~ John Green
No sure about deleting beautiful, brilliant prose, but I agree first drafts suck.
Be willing to write really badly. ~ Jennifer Egan
I don’t know about the willing part, but the second part is easy.
The outline is like the saddle, basically. That’s all you can do. Just hold on tight. ~ Alex Segura
[Writers drink alcohol because] they must change their identities a million times in their writing. This is tiring, but drinking does it automatically for them. One moment they are a king, the next a murderer, a jaded dilettante, a passionate and forsaken lover. ~ Patricia Highsmith
Good writers hate bad writing, but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does. ~ Dan Harmon
I should be pretty good by now.
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. ~ Mark Twain
On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts. ~ Stephen King
Is this also known as writing naked?
I always like to say writing a book is like trying to find your way into a house when you don’t have a key. And for me, writing the synopsis is that key. ~ Shawn S.A. Cosby
Either a writer doesn't want to talk about his work, or he talks about it more than you want. ~ Anatole Broyard
I’m in the second category
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the denouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
I hate to disagree with a legend, but what happened to rewriting?
We do not write because we must; we always have a choice. We write because language is the way we keep a hold on life. With words we experience our deepest understandings of what it means to be intimate. We communicate to connect, to know community. ~ Bell Hooks
When Thoreau wrote: ‘Simplify, simplify, simplify!’ shouldn’t he have edited it down to ‘Simplify!’? ~ CrankyPappy @CrankyPappy
Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ~ Dr. Samuel Johnson, to an aspiring writer
Ouch.
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‘we.’ ~ Mark Twain
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. ~ Ashish Chauhan @4shish
An author in his work must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. ~ Flaubert
I have the visible nowhere part down pat.
As a writer, I am a small businessman in a highly competitive field, fabricating a product for sale in a buyers' market, and required to establish my own merchandising and marketing procedures. ~ John D. MacDonald
The famous mystery author wrote this in 1950. He’d be blown away by today’s self-marketing demands.
Sometimes you really have to shove and grunt and sweat. Some days you go to your office and you're the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in. ~ Thomas Harris
But no one, no one, can teach you voice. Can teach you talent. Can teach you style. Can make you an original, unique writer. That’s all you. All yours. Seek it, experiment with it, find it, then hold it dear. ~ Meg Rosoff, author
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. ~ Eudora Welty
Without a rich inner life and the time to explore it, one loses heart, the quality of one’s creativity diminishes, and, thus, the desire to write evaporates. ~ Michael Bracken
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
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children. ~ Madeleine L'Engle
There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well. ~ Agatha Christie
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. ~ Terry Pratchett
In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities. ~ Sue Monk Kidd
Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. ~ Oscar Wilde
Yet fiction is all about removing the masks from our characters.
I enjoy self-publishing and sending publishers rejection letters. They’re like, ‘Who is this guy?’ And I’m like, ‘the end of your industry.’ ~ Ryan Lilly
I’ve never experienced writer’s block, but my wife often wishes I would experience talker’s block. ~ Bruce W. Most
The first command in writing fiction is to sit your ass in the chair. Some of us need Velcro pants. ~ John Dufresne
Writing is a matter of trusting your heart and gut more than logic, because people aren’t logical. Characters should do crazy things because that’s real life and I think that’s what we should write about. ~ Tess Gerritsen
After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year. ~ Robert Benchley
Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory. ~ Tennessee Williams
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus. ~ Enid Bagnold
Storytelling is an act of cruelty. We are cruel to our characters because to be kind is to invite boredom, and boredom in storytelling is synonymous with big doomy death-shaped death. So: be cruel to your protagonist. Rob him of something. Something important. Something he needs.
~ Chuck Wendig
This is all true, but it sure makes us storytellers sound like horrible people.
I’ve been writing the same book my whole life—that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family, and it’s not your choice, and you can’t get out. ~ Ann Patchett
A great story is life with the dull parts taken out. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. ~ George Orwell
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room. ~ Colm Toibin
The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book. ~ Mickey Spillane
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone life, just really being present to a lot of life. ~ Alice Walker
Part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. ~ Alice Walker
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. ~ Meg Rosoff
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. ~ Neil Gaiman
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. ~ John Steinbeck
I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. ~ Chinua Achebe
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil—but there is no way around them. ~ Isaac Asimov
I was sorry to hear my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I am not feeling very well myself. ~ Mark Twain
Don’t write what you know. What you know is boring. Write what you don’t know. ~ Ken Kesey.
‘Write about what you know’ is the most stupid thing I’ve heard. It encourages people to write a dull autobiography. It’s the reverse of firing the imagination and potential of writers. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop . . . suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself. ~ Edward Albee
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. ~ Josh Billings
Never let a bad memory get in the way of a good memoir. ~ Joanie Levenson
Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public. ~ Paulo Coelho
Can I at least wear a trench coat?
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like . . . So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. ~ Neil Gaiman
Fiction can Trojan Horse its way into your heart and soul and crack the window wide open. ~ Kira Peikoff
I used to think in terms of characters, how to develop their eccentricities and quirks. Then I realized that it’s better to focus on their relationships instead, and then the characters develop naturally. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running. ~ Gene Fowler
If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
~ Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk
How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 6
1 to screw it in
1 to sharpen all the pencils in the house
1 to make more coffee
1 to call a friend to chat
And 1 to complain there’s never time to do any writing
Wait, that’s only 5—that’s why they need editors.
Writing a story is taking the path of most resistance. ~ John Dufresne
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. ~ Anne Lamott
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ~ Joan Didion
The most healthy thing is to be true to your own self, but also, that you have a right to express what you see and what you feel and what you think. To be bold. ~ Alice Walker
If a situation doesn’t scare me, I figure it won’t scare my reader, either. I always try for the thing that’s going to frighten me. ~ Tess Gerritsen
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. ~ Annie Proulx
If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. ~ Margaret Atwood
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. ~ Johnathan Franzen
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole, you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there. ~ John Steinbeck
Pouring out liquor is like burning books. ~ William Faulkner
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass. If the feeling persists, you probably ought to write a novel. ~ Lawrence Block
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
I continue to do research as I’m writing a book, and it all evolves together. I get an idea, and then when I look into it, that gives me other ideas. ~ Patricia Cornwell
This is my pattern, too. Research sparks characters and plot, even theme.
People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. ~ Harlan Ellison
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary—it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ Somerset Maugham
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs
So where do the ideas—the salable ideas—come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious. ~ Stephen King
Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus. ~ Enid Bagnold
Storytelling is an act of cruelty. We are cruel to our characters because to be kind is to invite boredom, and boredom in storytelling is synonymous with big doomy death-shaped death. So: be cruel to your protagonist. Rob him of something. Something important. Something he needs.
~ Chuck Wendig
This is all true, but it sure makes us storytellers sound like horrible people.
I’ve been writing the same book my whole life—that you’re in one family, and all of a sudden, you’re in another family, and it’s not your choice, and you can’t get out. ~ Ann Patchett
A great story is life with the dull parts taken out. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. ~ George Orwell
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room. ~ Colm Toibin
The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book. ~ Mickey Spillane
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone life, just really being present to a lot of life. ~ Alice Walker
Part of writing is not so much that you’re going to actually write something every day, but what you should have, or need to have, is the possibility, which means the space and time set aside—as if you were going to have someone come to tea. ~ Alice Walker
Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul. ~ Meg Rosoff
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. ~ Neil Gaiman
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised. ~ John Steinbeck
I believe myself that a good writer doesn’t really need to be told anything except to keep at it. ~ Chinua Achebe
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil—but there is no way around them. ~ Isaac Asimov
I was sorry to hear my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I am not feeling very well myself. ~ Mark Twain
Don’t write what you know. What you know is boring. Write what you don’t know. ~ Ken Kesey.
‘Write about what you know’ is the most stupid thing I’ve heard. It encourages people to write a dull autobiography. It’s the reverse of firing the imagination and potential of writers. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop . . . suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself. ~ Edward Albee
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. ~ Josh Billings
Never let a bad memory get in the way of a good memoir. ~ Joanie Levenson
Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public. ~ Paulo Coelho
Can I at least wear a trench coat?
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like . . . So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter. ~ Neil Gaiman
Fiction can Trojan Horse its way into your heart and soul and crack the window wide open. ~ Kira Peikoff
I used to think in terms of characters, how to develop their eccentricities and quirks. Then I realized that it’s better to focus on their relationships instead, and then the characters develop naturally. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro
Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running. ~ Gene Fowler
If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.
~ Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk
How many writers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 6
1 to screw it in
1 to sharpen all the pencils in the house
1 to make more coffee
1 to call a friend to chat
And 1 to complain there’s never time to do any writing
Wait, that’s only 5—that’s why they need editors.
Writing a story is taking the path of most resistance. ~ John Dufresne
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. ~ Anne Lamott
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. ~ Joan Didion
The most healthy thing is to be true to your own self, but also, that you have a right to express what you see and what you feel and what you think. To be bold. ~ Alice Walker
If a situation doesn’t scare me, I figure it won’t scare my reader, either. I always try for the thing that’s going to frighten me. ~ Tess Gerritsen
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write. ~ Annie Proulx
If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page. ~ Margaret Atwood
Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money. ~ Johnathan Franzen
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole, you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there. ~ John Steinbeck
Pouring out liquor is like burning books. ~ William Faulkner
If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass. If the feeling persists, you probably ought to write a novel. ~ Lawrence Block
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ~ Edgar Allan Poe
I continue to do research as I’m writing a book, and it all evolves together. I get an idea, and then when I look into it, that gives me other ideas. ~ Patricia Cornwell
This is my pattern, too. Research sparks characters and plot, even theme.
People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn’t like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that’s all there is to it. ~ Harlan Ellison
All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary—it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences. ~ Somerset Maugham
If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs
So where do the ideas—the salable ideas—come from? They come from my nightmares. Not the night-time variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious. ~ Stephen King
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