Writing Quotes

Don’t ever write a novel unless it hurts like a hot turd coming out

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

All is a-swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.

Goals are dreams with a deadline.

It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

It is not the strength, but the duration, of great sentiments that makes great men.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

Writing is easy: just stare at the screen of your computer until a tear drops on your keyboard.

You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know

drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

...writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

[Y]ou cannot mention everything in its proper place, you must choose, between the things not worth mentioning and those and those even less so.

How many things can I do without?

There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.

There's no equivalent to Mozart in writing.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!

Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book, ' I said. He didn't hit me.

The things of the world fell by the wayside . . . but literature was eternal.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues....

Never miss an opportunity of noticing anything of beauty ...

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

if you have to wait for it to roar out ofyou, then wait patiently.if it never does roar out of you, do something else.

...Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer...called books 'the scholar's mistress'...the one who made no demands and always took him in...

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.

If you would be remembered, write a book worth the reading or live a life worth the writing about.

Work, love, courage and hope, Make me good and help me cope!

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

I write fiction""What’s fiction?""Fiction is an improvement on life.

The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

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.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

We have the St. Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still

The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo.""Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?

The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.

When you write a story you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story.

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

Words made you mighty. Words, stories, books: they could take you anywhere, and they could go out anywhere in the world. Jenny -- Jane -- picked up her pen, and began to write.

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.

The truth is that most writers are needy.

The centuries are sprinkled with rare magicwith divine creatureswho help us get past the common and extraordinary ills that beset us