Writing Quotes - Page 24

• The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life - and one is as good as another.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Book, Lucky, Wrecks

  Ernest Hemingway, Carlos Baker (2003). “Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961”, p.305, Simon and Schuster

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• You can write about anything, and if you write well enough, even the reader with no intrinsic interest in the subject will become involved.

  Tracy Kidder

  Enough, Interest, Reader

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• You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair - the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

  Stephen King

  Girl, Eye, Heart

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

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• Drama, instead of telling us the whole of a man's life, must place him in such a situation, tie such a knot, that when it is untied, the whole man is visible.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Drama, Men, Ties

  Virginia Woolf, Samuel Solomonovitch Koteliansky, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy (graf), Aleksandr Borisovich Golʹdenveĭzer (2006). “Translations from the Russian”

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• An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

  Juvenal

  Insane, Possession, Breasts

  "Satires". Book by Juvenal, VII, line 51, 1890.

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• It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

  Dorothy Parker

  Thinking, Six Months, Stories

  The Paris Review, 1956.

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• We writers have this saying 'Kill your darlings'... but I suppose you family men don't agree with it.

  Mike Pohjola

  Men, Family Man, Darling

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• I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

  Ingmar Bergman

  Skeletons, Flesh, Scripts

  The New York Times, January 22, 1978.

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• Sex almost always disappoints me in novels. Everything can be said or done now, and that's what I often find: everything, a feeling of generality or dispersal. But in my experience, true sex is so particular, so peculiar to the person who yearns for it. Only he or she, and no one else, would desire so very much that very person under those circumstances. In fiction, I miss that sense of terrific specificity.

  Anatole Broyard

  Sex, Missing, Feelings

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• Plotting isn't like sex, because you can go back and adjust it afterwards. Whether you plan your story beforehand or not, if the climax turns out to be the revelation that the mad professor's anti-gravity device actually works, you must go back and silently delete all those flying cars buzzing around the city on page one. If you want to reveal something, you need to hide it properly first.

  Colin Greenland

  Sex, Cities, Flying Cars

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• I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.

  Gore Vidal

  Sex, Fiction, Reason

  FaceBook post by Gore Vidal from Sep 17, 2011

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• Life is very full of sex, or should be. As much as I admire Tolkien - and I do, he was a giant of fantasy and a giant of literature, and I think he wrote a great book that will be read for many years - you do have to wonder where all those Hobbits came from, since you can't imagine Hobbits having sex, can you? Well, sex is an important part of who we are. It drives us, it motivates us, it makes us do sometimes very noble things and it makes us do sometimes incredibly stupid things. Leave it out, and you've got an incomplete world.

  George R. R. Martin

  Sex, Stupid, Book

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• To grow in craft is to increase the bredth of what I can do, but art is the depth, the passion, the desire, the courage to be myself and myself alone.

  Pat Schneider

  Art, Passion, Desire

  Pat Schneider (2003). “Writing Alone and with Others”, p.22, Oxford University Press

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• There are no rules in writing. There are useful principles. Throw them away when they're not useful. But always know what you're throwing away.

  Will Shetterly

  Principles, Throwing, Knows

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• Moving around is good for creativity: the next line of dialogue that you desperately need may well be waiting in the back of the refrigerator or half a mile along your favorite walk.

  Will Shetterly

  Moving, Creativity, Waiting

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• You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop-H2O. The reader will get it.

  George Singleton

  Rain, Water, Barrels

  George Singleton (2008). “Pep Talks, Warnings, And Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom And Cautionary Advice For Writers”, p.46, Writer's Digest Books

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• The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.

  Ethel Wilson

  World, Four, Five

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• I work every day - or at least I force myself into office or room. I may get nothing done, but you don't earn bonuses without putting in time. Nothing may come for three months, but you don't earn the fourth without it.

  Mordecai Richler

  Office, Rooms, Months

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• The blizzard doesn't last forever; it just seems so.

  Ray Bradbury

  Forever, Lasts, Blizzard

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• Composition is for the most part an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

  Samuel Johnson

  Perseverance, Effort, Mind

  Samuel Johnson (1825). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.”, p.145

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• Pick a better verb. Most people use twenty verbs to describe everything from a run in their stocking to the explosion of an A-bomb.

  Janet Fitch

  Running, People, Twenties

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• Writing is putting one's obsessions in order.

  Jean Grenier

  Order, Obsession

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• Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

  Elie Wiesel

  Order, Sculpture, Pages

  Elie Wiesel, Robert Franciosi (2002). “Elie Wiesel: Conversations”, p.72, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• When you write, you lay out a line of words.
  Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

  Annie Dillard

  Finding Yourself, Lines, Territory

  Annie Dillard (2009). “The Writing Life”, p.3, Harper Collins

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• Be direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Simple, Editing, Written Language

  Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler (1931). “The King's English”, Oxford University Press

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