Writing Quotes
It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together.
All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
An obscure flesh-and-blood Gascon, forgotten by History, transformed into a legendary giant by the novelist's genius
Don’t polish it forever, put it out there. At some point the changes aren’t improvements, they’re just changes.
Inspiration is the crèche of your brainchildren. If you don’t feed them, they will die, and never come back. So someone please think about the children!
People are suckers for the truth and they know it when they see it. Open your soul and they will stop and watch.
Dig deep and go where the pain and fear and joy are, and put it out there. The minute you shy away from pure honesty in your writing, you become a liar.
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
One of the key secrets of great writing is knowing where to start and when to stop.
The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.
When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?
From school desks with inkwells and scratchy nibs on paper to sweaty finger prints on a tablet... technology progression yes... style?
...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts.
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
A blank page is no empty space. It is brimming with potential... It is a masterpiece in waiting -- yours.
All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.
I don’t just want a gripping story line. I shoot for the three dimensional literary Braille to a silent Scorsese movie
... yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood...
If grammar is the skeleton of expression and usage the flesh and blood, then style is the personality.
You are not an "author, " you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author.
During 30 years of earning my daily bread as a writer I have learned many lessons about our craft. The most significant of those lessons is that I still have many lessons to learn about out craft.
When I write, I am gossiping. Writing to whisper the story, whether good or bad to my listener.
Great literary works are not measured by the number of words, but by the impact they create.
To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else.
If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all.
We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.
I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer. Come dream with me.
I lived for two years in Odawara, a castle town an hour outside of Tokyo, near the sea. It's a beautiful place, and I drew on my experiences there when writing 'The Lake of Dreams.'
I like telling stories with a sense of humor. But humor can also distance you from the subject you're writing about. I'm interested in using humor as a portal to something a bit more serious.
You write the way you think about the world. My motto in times of trouble - and I'm speaking of life, not writing - is 'no humor too black.'
Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.
Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.
It's hilarious to me that by writing an obscene fake children's book I am mistaken for a parenting expert.
I'm not a parenting expert by any means, but I've been interviewing and writing about kids for almost 20 years.
One of my favorite things I read was John Steinbeck's journals while he was writing 'East of Eden, ' which was so cool.
When you're writing with an artist or for an artist, you have to help them serve their vision. That's the cool part about writing songs. There are no rules.
I started writing stories in sixth grade. But writing wasn't cool, like being good at sports, or being part of the in crowd, or winning fights on the playground.
I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.
I feel like communication is the same whether you're cooking for someone or singing or writing a song or writing a play or ordering from McDonald's.
Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.