Writers And Writing Quotes - Page 6

• It's better to write about things you feel than about things you know about.

  L.P. Hartley

  Writing, Feels, Knows

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• I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Funny Life, Writing, Sound

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• There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

  Terry Pratchett

  Block, Writing, California

  Interview with SFBC's Joyce Wiley, www.lspace.org. 1996.

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• Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

  Jules Renard

  Success, Writing, People

  Jules Renard, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Roget (2008). “The Journal of Jules Renard”, p.286, Tin House Books

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• When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I am going to produce a work of art.' I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

  George Orwell

  Art, Lying, Book

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.315, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.

  Ray Bradbury

  Hero, Writing, Want

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• It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

  Robert Southey

  Happiness, Teacher, Teaching

  "A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, Both Ancient and Modern" ed. by Tryon Edwards, F. B. Dickerson Company, (p. 52), 1908.

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• If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Writing, Character, Passion

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• Those who write clearly have readers.

  Albert Camus

  Writing, Reader, Writing By Writers

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• When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

  Enrique Jardiel Poncela

  Writing, Effort, Gone

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• There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.

  H. L. Mencken

  Writing, Dull, Subjects

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• The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

  Mary Heaton Vorse

  Art, Writing, Pants

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• Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

  John Steinbeck

  Writing, Paper, Excuse

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• Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Writing, Schizophrenia, Form

  Interview in "Writers at Work" (The Paris Review Interviews), 8th Series, 1988.

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• Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Nature, Rain, Writing

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• There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

  Robert Graves

  Money, Writing, Poetry

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Inspiration, Writing, Long

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• Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

  William Faulkner

  Writing, Epic, Study

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• Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

  Harlan Ellison

  Book, Writing, World

  "Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of Money as a Writer". Book by Jim Denney and James D. Denney, 2003.

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• Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

  James Russell Lowell

  Children, Writing, Fit

  James Russell Lowell (1873). “The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell”, p.162

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• Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Thinking, People

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

  Stephen King

  Writing, Character, Trying

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• Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

  Susan Sontag

  Dream, Reading, Writing

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• Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything.

  Philip K. Dick

  Sorry, Writing, Fiction

  Philip K. Dick (1985). “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, Doubleday Books

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• If writing seems hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things people do.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, People, Perfection

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