Writing Quotes - Page 11

• Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

  Edward Gibbon

  Art, Book, Learning

  Edward Gibbon (1814). “The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon: With Memoirs of His Life and Writings”, p.56

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• All the information you need can be given in dialogue.

  Elmore Leonard

  Confusing, Needs, Information

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• The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

  Andre Gide

  Beautiful, Madness, Reason

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• The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Reality, Spirit, Appearance

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• Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.

  Anne McCaffrey

  Together, Using Words, Story Writers

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• Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

  Nancy Kress

  Fiction, Stuff, Screwed Up

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• Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

  Samuel Butler

  Book, Want, Born

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

  Stephen King

  Character, Trying, Monsters

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• Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Witty, Lying, Three

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook D 25, 1799.

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• Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

  Bernard Malamud

  Revision, Pleasure, Exquisite

  "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life". The New York Times, March 20, 1988.

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• People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Funny, Sarcastic, Sarcasm

  "Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1841-1843".

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• A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Friendship, Spirit, Thrive

  Friedrich Nietzsche, R. J. Hollingdale (1996). “Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.92, Cambridge University Press

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• I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously.

  Ray Bradbury

  Believe, Taken, Thinking

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward.

  Colin Powell

  Country, Moving, Philadelphia

  "Bayh Indictment of Washington Causes Little Soul Searching". www.foxnews.com. February 21, 2010.

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• To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

  Anne Rice

  Risk, Literature, Fool

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Everything that is written merely to please the author is worthless.

  Blaise Pascal

  Mathematical, Please, Written

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• And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

  J. K. Rowling

  Notebook, Ideas, Cafes

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• I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.

  Tom Stoppard

  Play, Way, Contradicting

  Tom Stoppard, Paul Delaney (1994). “Tom Stoppard in Conversation”, p.49, University of Michigan Press

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• All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Matter, Story Writers, Stories

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• I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Successful, Interesting, Doubt

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• People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

  Harlan Ellison

  Morning, Thinking, Typewriters

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• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

  Winston Churchill

  Inspirational, Positive, Badass

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• Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion

  Journalism, Selling, Famous Writers

  Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968) p. xvi

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• I'm a strong believer in telling stories through a limited but very tight third person point of view. I have used other techniques during my career, like the first person or the omniscient view point, but I actually hate the omniscient viewpoint. None of us have an omniscient viewpoint; we are alone in the universe. We hear what we can hear... we are very limited. If a plane crashes behind you I would see it but you wouldn't. That's the way we perceive the world and I want to put my readers in the head of my characters.

  George R. R. Martin

  Strong, Hate, Character

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  I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

  Douglas Adams

  Love, Inspirational, Hilarious

  "The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (Dirk Gently, Book 3)". Book by Douglas Adams, 2002.

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