Writing Quotes - Page 20

• Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

  Stephen King

  Kings, Imagination, Should

  FaceBook post by Stephen King from Nov 10, 2013

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• There's always room for a story that can transport people to another place.

  J. K. Rowling

  Inspirational, Inspiring, People

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• You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

  Anatole France

  Editing, Sentences, Good Writers

  "Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record by His Secretary". Book by Jean-Jacques Brousson, 1925.

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• Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Book, Dare, Ifs

  Emile M. Cioran (1976). “The Trouble with Being Born”, Viking Books

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• The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him

  Thomas Ligotti

  Fate, Hands, Stories

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• Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Book, Mean

  The Picture of Dorian Gray preface (1891)

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• Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

  Wallace Stegner

  Practice, Skills, Knack

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• As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

  Stephen King

  Art, Fun, Practice

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.178, Simon and Schuster

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• A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

  Dylan Thomas

  Art, Creativity, Reality

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (1992). “On the Air with Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

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• For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

  A. A. Milne

  Editing, Long, Brain

  Winnie-the-Pooh ch. 4 (1926)

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• Most new writers think it's easy to write for children, but it's not. You have to get in a beginning, middle and end, tell a great story, write well, not be condescending-all in a few pages.

  Andrea Brown

  Children, Thinking, Stories

  "The World Doesn't Need Another Rhyming Tooth Fairy Story: A Conversation with Children's Book Agent Andrea Brown". Interview with Anna Olswanger, www.underdown.org. 1998.

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• I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

  William Carlos Williams

  Thinking, Disease

  Quoted in Newsweek, 7 Jan 1957.

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• The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

  Fran Lebowitz

  Tables, Fame, Enough

  "Who is the most outstanding person of 2001? You tell us" by Kate Kellaway, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2001.

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• A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

  Marguerite Yourcenar

  Hands, Play, Musician

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• Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

  Oscar Wilde

  Sweet, Real, Creativity

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.22, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

  Richard Chenevix Trench

  Editing, English Grammar, Speech

  Richard Chenevix Trench (1867). “On the Study of Words Lectures Addressed (originally) to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-school, Winchester by Richard Chenevix Trench”, p.22

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• you must not come lightly to the blank page.

  Stephen King

  Pages, Blank Pages, Blank

  Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.99, Simon and Schuster

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• You can fix anything but a blank page.

  Nora Roberts

  Pages, Blank Pages, Blank

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• All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Stolen

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• A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Should Have, Rejection, Appreciated

  Jorge Luis Borges (2013). “Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations”, p.9, Melville House

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• The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

  Bernard Malamud

  Moving, Ideas, Pencils

  Bernard Malamud, Lawrence M. Lasher (1991). “Conversations with Bernard Malamud”, p.32, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

  Joseph Conrad

  Life, Art, Men

  Some Reminiscences ch. 1 (1912)

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• That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

  Renata Adler

  Sleep, Phones, Self

  Renata Adler (2013). “Speedboat”, p.30, New York Review of Books

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• [Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

  Terry Pratchett

  Fiction, Way, Mainstream

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• A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Style, Firsts

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