Every word I write is a seed that I may nurture into a small, beautiful poem or a tall, soaring tree.
~ Rob Bignell
You can't be a good writer in the States anymore because to be a good one you have to have a country where you can be poor and still eat, and still make your living standard secondary to your writing. Thoreau himself couldn't do that in the States today.
~ Nelson Algren
Your first written sentence is the foundation of all of your dreams.
Folding the laundry, completing another project at work, or watching television for the next hour doesn’t build your writing muscles. It only leaves them flabby.
And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better.
~ David Mitchell
I hope for what I always hope for as a writer: a critical but kind reader. I think that is what we all hope for.
~ Christos Tsiolkas
By writing, we partake in something greater than ourselves. Pick up pen and paper or take a seat at your computer today and create something of beauty.
You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?
~ Peter Watts
It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
~ Louise Glück
Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
~ Ernest Hemingway
Can we all pause a moment to appreciate the artistry of that sentence? Sitting casually on the floor, a guard sat... That's freaking art right there! Someone nominate this thing for the Hugo Award already!
~ Jim C. Hines
It's a phenomenal experience jumping from the devious mind of a sorceress bent on conquering the world to the compassionate musing of a queen capable of healing life with a touch—all in a flicker of thought. That's why I love writing.
~ Richelle E. Goodrich
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
Only one-tenth of what you write will make it into your manuscript, but when you knock on that tenth” – I rap my knuckles on the table – “you’ll hear oaken solidity, not sawdust and glue.
The swing between confronting the dangerous or brutal and the beautiful or the kind is one of the elements of being human that I have battled with all my life. That mixture of love and savagery is there in every important relationship in our lives: with parents, siblings, lovers, our closest friends. I have always wanted to be faithful to that truth.
Jenny Marzen is who again? Amy knew perfectly well who she was. Jenny Marzen was hot, hotter than Amy had ever been, and Jenny Marzen would be washed up in ten years and didn't know it. And Jenny is my number one fan?No, but she likes you. She read your stories in grad school.What is she, twelve?The point is, she really liked the article, and all that stuff about experience and news. Lex says she says you've got gravitas.That's a dirty lie. I never even had mono.
~ Jincy Willett
The writer is editor, marketer, blogger, reader, thinker, designer, publisher, public speaker, budget-maker, contract reader, trouble-shooter, coffee-hound, liver-pickler, shame-farmer, god, devil, gibbering protozoa.
~ Chuck Wendig
Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
~ Carl William Brown
People who wrote novels about universities hardly ever got them right. Max had spent his short working life untenured, but still he'd managed to be a charming magnet wherever he taught, and Amy had surfeited on faculty gossip and professorial antics and the general behavior of academics, who were as a whole no more brilliant or Machiavellian than travel agents. They tended toward shabbier clothes and manners, and of course there was the occasional storied eccentric or truly original mind, but most college campuses — especially the older ones — functioned less as brain trusts than as wildlife preserves, housing and protecting people who wouldn't last a week in GenPop.
The only way to write is to write. Writers write. And when they’ve written, they write some more.
~ Jasper Fforde
A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.(on Ezra Pound)
~ Gertrude Stein
My father once admonished me to master the laws that govern fine writing until I could weave my words into worlds. If ever I accomplish that feat, I will sign my name to the tale.
~ Brandon Mull
Zafar argues that the greatest influence on a writer may be on her psychic dispositions as a writer. Reading Philip Roth, writes Zafar, might clear the way of inhibitions that held you back from writing about reckless desire, the temptations of power, and the immanence of rage, or reading Naipaul might convince you to seize the ego that so wants to be loved, drag it outside, put it up against a wall, and shoot it.
~ Zia Haider Rahman
In my imagination, the Editor meditated in a mountain-cave, espoused the rules of grammar, and frowned upon speculative fiction.
~ Josh Malerman
What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Gay life is this object out there that’s waiting to be written about. A lot of people think we’ve exhausted all the themes of gay fiction, but we’ve just barely touched on them.
~ Edmund White
As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writing is clumsy. She even gets the title wrong: she's confusing 'chrysalis' and 'cocoon'. You could pick it apart completely if you wanted to. But the story itself has real power: it draws you in. the overall plots is a fantasy, but the descriptive details is incredibly real.The balance between the two is excellent. I don't know if words like 'originality' or Inevitability' fit here, and I suppose I might agree if someone insisted it's not at that level, but finally, after you work your way through the thing, with all its faults, it leaves a real impression- it gets to you in some strange, inexplicable way that may be a little disturbing.
~ Haruki Murakami
Much has been made about the death of the novel and the end of literature as it’s seen to be assailed by technology, by the web, by the many and varied new forms of entertainment and culture. I don’t share that pessimism because I think it is one of the great inventions of the human spirit.
~ Richard Flanagan
If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader.
~ Aman Jassal
A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe.(on Mark Twain)
~ William Faulkner
That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.
Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.
~ Gore Vidal
Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I am not here to fucking entertain you.
Writers are disguised sorcerers. Armed with their mighty pens, they cast spells on their readers using words that could pierce right through the heart and soul. If our writings moved you, made you cry, made you think deeper, and sort of changed your perspective about things, then we can say, we had you under our spell. - Elizabeth Esguerra Castillo's Quotes
~ Elizabeth E. Castillo
Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can’t for long conceal the toxic spots on your character—Philip Larkin is Exhibit A—nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
~ William Giraldi
We have story-makers and we have writers apparently most of the today's writing falls into the first category.
~ Pushpa Rana
A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.
~ Nikita Dudani
My only wish is to be buried with my books.
When dealing with writers it breaks down like this: a regular writer is your average everyday megalomaniac. Like every artist, there's a part of them that believes--nay, knows--the world turns for them. Most are harmless. Some are obnoxious. Some are Bret Easton Ellis.
~ Hannah Strom-Martin
The truth is that most writers are needy.
~ Stephen King
