Writing Advice Quotes

Nouns and verbs are the guts of the language. Beware of covering up with adjectives and adverbs.

~ A.b. Guthrie Jr.

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

~ George Eliot

You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.

~ Adair Lara

Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.

~ Jules Verne

Life is not a submarine.

~ Anne Lamott

On the whole, I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings who you think are sadly mistaken.

~ Penelope Fitzgerald

People say that writers write for money. From my own experience that's not true. I write for me. I publish for money.

~ Greg Curtis

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.

~ Len Wein

Good writing demands self-discipline and constant learning

~ Cecil Murphey

Don't be 'a writer.' Be writing.

~ William Faulkner

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long words that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb. every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what-these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to education and rank.

~ William Zinsser

I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived; I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flowers that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.

~ Eduardo Galeano

Make your heroes ambitious, always looking for more success and uniqueness.To write the best story you can, think of making your hero, or heroes, have an ambitious for an unlimited success.-How to write the best story-

~ Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Deal with your readers that theyare smart, and write a language thatsuits their intelligence.- How to write the best story-

~ Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Choose noble goals for your heroes.Make them Sympathize with the poor, collaborates on the good goals, always step forward for the good actions, the first ones to do the right things, care to reserve others rights, and respect the laws, traditions and values.

~ Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one.

~ John Steinbeck

T.S. Eliot said to me 'There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn’t matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it’s in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.' What matters, is to connect your own voice with an infinite range of verbal cadences & sequences – and only endless actual experience of your ear can store all that in your nervous system. The rest can be left to your life & your character.

~ Ted Hughes

Publish. Be damned. Repeat.

~ Tassa Desalada

The most basic rule of editing is that if you can’t bear to read it, no one else can either. So when you find yourself skimming, commit murder.

~ Marion Roach Smith

Writing a full length novel is very much like driving a car with snakes in your pants—you just never know what’s going to happen. -- James Scott Bell

~ Sue Ward Drake

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

~ Ernest Hemingway

You have to simply love writing, and you have to remind yourself often that you love it.

~ Susan Orlean

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

~ Zadie Smith

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

~ Edna O'brien

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

~ James Baldwin

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination.

~ Jim Jarmuscdh

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.

~ Arthur Miller

Talent is cheap. What matters is discipline.

~ Andre Dubus

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.

~ Truman Capote

Make it so good and so clear that it doesn't need any further explanation.

~ Shel Silverstein

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

~ Arnold Bennett

When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away even if it's only a glass of water.

~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

~ Susan Sontag

[G]ive nothing centrality, because writing is about continually shifting weight from one thing and moment to the other.

~ Amit Chaudhuri

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

Write about only three things: what you love, what you hate, and what you’re deeply conflicted about.

~ Marlon James

I hate dialect. It gets in the way. If there is a need for dialect, you can render it quite easily by reproducing the rythm of that form of speech. Then you don't need to bother with silly spellings

~ Diana Wynne Jones

A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.

~ Graham Greene

Storytelling is in our DNA. It's what differentiates humans from other species: we don't just communicate information. We tell stories.

~ Gabriela Pereira

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

~ Zane Grey