Writing Quotes

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

~ John Scalzi

...hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy it; joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness

~ Philip K. Dick

I maintain that cultural sensitivity should be replaced by cultural awareness. Awareness implies research, consideration, thought, and judiciousness....Sensitivity denies equal access to language. It segregates and censors based on the background of the writer rather than the content of the story. No society can embrace cultural sensitivity and retain full capacity for freedom of speech.

~ Scott M. Roberts

The finest SF comes to grips with life's mysteries, with our resentments against our own natures and our limited societies. It does so by asking basic questions in the artful, liberating way that is unique to this form of writing. Echoes of it are found in other forms of fiction - in the novel of ideas, in the historical novel, in the writings of the great philosophers and scientists; but the best SF does this all more searchingly, by taking what is in most people only a moment of wonder and rebellion against the arbitrariness of existence and making of it an art enriched by knowledge and possibility, expressing our deepest human longing to penetrate into the dark heart of the unknown.

~ George Zebrowski

May it be written. May it be done.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

If you can read the book and say, ‘Space Marines, YEEEAAAHHH!’ That’s Military Science Fiction.” (Brigham Young writing lecture, March 2012)

~ Brandon Sanderson

I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.

~ Octavia E. Butler

Fantasy is totally wide open; all you really have to do is follow the rules you've set. But if you're writing about science, you have to first learn what you're writing about.

~ Octavia E. Butler

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Given that media has become fast-paced, readers now want books that show the action and don’t just tell you what is happening. Modern readers don’t want three pages of descriptions of a farmhouse. They want to hear the door’s creak quiet the chirping of crickets out in the cornfield, they want to feel the cool air drift through the house, then they want to see the shadow of a man, gun drawn, standing over the bed of his disloyal lover.

~ Jennifer Arnett

In poetry, the best way to say cuss words is to hide it behind metaphors.

~ Ymatruz

I say, flawless poems do not exist.

~ Ymatruz

Blank pages are cruelPure torture in white or beigeBut how else to start

~ A.a. Patawaran

No. Not really red,but the color of a rose when it bleeds.

~ Anne Sexton

Never durst a poet touch a pen to writeUntil his ink was tempered with love's sighs.

~ William Shakespeare

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. 

~ Pablo Neruda

I only ever wanted to feel more human.

~ Timothy Joshua

At the end of all things, why do lovers break up? Because love is magic. You have to believe, for it to exist.

~ Timothy Joshua

what is poetry if not seeing and feeling, and feeling, feelings running deepand okay – do I see, notice the gray pigeon feathers that heave by on drafts of passing cars reeking, leaking gasoline fumesand okay – do I feel?

~ Beth Morey

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

~ Kelli Russell Agodon

You can't write a poem until you live.

~ Shannon Lynette

She reminded me that I could write stories,/could be struck by lightning & live.

~ Jen Currin

Sometimes, I marvel at the wonderof how graceful words seem to appearpen to paper; in others' handsAnd I think to myself-oh, how obsolete my existence is,to be unable to do the same.

~ Joy Chua

How many great gems were lost to thoughtand not put down to pen.You can but think of just a fewand then they're lost again.

~ L.f. Young

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

~ Rita Dove

The more I write the more I learn about writing. It is easy to say what looks good or sound good on paper until you experience it for yourself.

~ Jeanette Michelle

Writing sharpens life, life enriches writing.

~ Sylvia Plath

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

~ Mark Nepo

You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was.

~ A.s. Byatt

Experience is an author’s most valuable asset, experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

~ Mark Twain

A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing comes from what has been accepted and experienced both and that I have just not got that far yet all the time. Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

~ Flannery O'connor

Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy from (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction need to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.

~ Ben Marcus

The written word is what distinguishes us from all other animal life forms on this earth.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of sentences, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination.

~ William H. Gass

I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former

~ Ben Lerner

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world's work. With these we try to save our very lives.

~ Annie Dillard

Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

Language is very tough, though, a tenacity that is backed up by a long history. However it is treated, its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged, even if that treatment is rather rough. It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine—without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.

~ Haruki Murakami