Writing Quotes

I think of rounds of editing as hammer time. Then, when they interrupt my writing, I can say... *shakes head* Nah, I just can't do it. Although when I come across a brilliant line, I do think, Can't touch this. And when I'm worried I'm overwriting a scene, I think, Hammer, don't hurt 'em.

~ Brent Weeks

The realistic style is easy to abuse: from haste, from lack of awareness, from inability to bridge the chasm that lies between what a writer would like to be able to say and what he actually knows how to say. It is easy to fake; brutality is not strength, flipness is not wit, edge-of-the-chair writing can be as boring as flat writing; dalliance with promiscuous blondes can be very dull stuff when described by goaty young men with no other purpose in mind than to describe dalliance with promiscuous blondes.

~ Raymond Chandler

Tell him I said that he will know when he's my age that books aren't written on whims or old promises. Books are written on years turned inside out by ideas that never let go until you get them in print, and even then writing's a last resort, a desperate ransom you pay to get your life back.

~ Richard Bach

Literature might be called the art of story, and story might in turn be called a universal language, for every culture we know of has a tradition of storytelling. No doubt stories have touched your life, too, from bedtime stories you may have heard as a child to news stories you see on TV or read in a newspaper. We might even say that a major goal of living is to created the story of our own lives, a story we hope to take pleasure and pride in telling.

~ Andrea A. Lunsford

...writing surrounds us: it's not something we do just in school or on the job but something that is as familiar and everyday as a pair of worn sneakers or the air we breathe.

~ Andrea A. Lunsford

Working together as a team helps build a cohesive organization.

~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

I thought about writing the character as male, but then I would be forced to portray him as a woman in a man's body.

~ Christopher Stocking

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.

~ Frederick Weisel

M is for magic. All the letters are, if you put them together properly. You can make magic with them, and dreams, and, I hope, even a few surprises...

~ Neil Gaiman

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

~ Ernest Hemingway

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

~ Kate Morton

The surest path to success is to learn to have a healthy relationship with failure. If we aren't failing, then we aren't doing anything interesting.

~ Kristen Lamb

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work.

~ Ilsa J. Bick

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

~ George Orwell

Comparisons deplete the actuality of the things compared... (Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read)

~ William S. Wilson

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

~ Markus Zusak

I am not a fan of the magical quick fix in any fiction, including fantasy, scifi and comic books. Unless Dr. Who is involved, and then only because we get to use the phrase 'Timey-wimey wibbliness' which, I'm sure you'll agree, there are not enough occasions to drop into ordinary adult conversation.

~ Chris Dee

I’m 100% certain of the quality of story I’m writing until I finish the outline and actually begin to write. At this point, I’m 100% certain the story sucks and I will never show it to another living soul. Until I type “THE END.” At this point, I’m 50% certain it sucks, 50% certain it’s brilliant, and 100% certain if I don’t show it to someone I will spontaneously combust.

~ Renee Miller

The principles of storytelling do not change. Going home. Coming of age. Sin and redemption. The hero. The journey, The power of love. They are hardwired into us, just like our taste buds process sweet, sour, bitter, and salt. Can a new voice come up with something startling and creative and unprecedented? Absolutely. Can they invent a fifth taste? No. No, they can’t. Can they make it so we don’t like sweet anymore? No, no they can’t.

~ Chris Dee

Publication is a marathon, not a sprint. Writing the book is only the start.

~ Jo Linsdell

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change. If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver pin that marked the crossroads.

~ Ann Patchett

Sooner or later every writer evolves his own definition of a story.Mine is: A reflection of life plus beginning and end (life seems not to have either) and a meaning.

~ Mary O'hara

Writing is not about the voices in your head, but the voices that make the great leap to the page.

~ J.h. Glaze

I will keep no further journal of that same hesternal torch‐light ; and, to prevent me from returning, like a dog, to the vomit of memory, I tear out the remaining leaves of this volume...

~ George Gordon Byron

Writers of fiction embellish reality almost without knowing it.

~ Aljean Harmetz

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

~ Anne Rice

For the length of time it takes to write a book, you need to believe that you’re the only writer in existence; the only one who matters. You need to shut yourself away and allow the creativity to build up, not leak out through worry and comparisons and doubt.

~ Martin Cosgrove

I often think publishing a book is like doing a poo. Once it's ready for the world, you have to relinquish that control and let nature take its course. A few will be impressed by your creation, others will be disgusted. Plus, no one will enjoy your success and achievement in producing it as much as you did.

~ H.o. Charles

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere?

~ Nick Harkaway

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

~ Jack London

You might say as you tirelessly said of my stories, at least of the adjectives, that I should render the evidence, not render the verdict... (Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read)

~ William S. Wilson

...each part of a story, each word if possible, was to work frontally as well as laterally... (Conveyance: The Story I would Not Want Bill Wilson To Read)

~ William S. Wilson

And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is for great men; and it's silly.Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way, or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

~ Hélène Cixous

The only way you can write is by the light of the bridges burning behind you.

~ Richard Peck

I write because, if I don't, my characters will murder me in my sleep.

~ Astrid 'Artistikem' Cruz

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.

~ Stephen King

Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion! I write to make people anxious and miserable and to worsen their indigestion.

~ Wendy Cope

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

~ Wallace Stegner

Fact is just fiction with different storytellers

~ Abby Slovin