Writing Quotes - Page 6

• Easy reading is damn hard writing.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Powerful, Reading, Inspire

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• The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

  Oscar Wilde

  Inspirational, Anger, Reading

  The Picture of Dorian Gray ch. 19 (1891)

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• What no wife of a writer can ever understand...is that a writer is working when he's staring out the window.

  Burton Rascoe

  Wife, Window, Staring

  "Shake Well Before Using: A New Collection of Impressions and Anecdotes, Mostly Humorous" by Bennett Cerf, (p. 118), 1948.

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• Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.

  Orson Scott Card

  Past, Ideas, People

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• I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

  Mark Haddon

  Running, Gay, Literature

  "B is for bestseller" by Mark Haddon, www.theguardian.com. April 11, 2004.

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• The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul--BOOKS.

  Emily Dickinson

  Book, Reading, Soul

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• I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Thinking, Paris, Worry

  Ernest Hemingway (1992). “Complete Poems”, p.22, U of Nebraska Press

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• If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, "Wake up and write the book!

  Kerry Greenwood

  Book, Buns, Would Be

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• If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Character, Possibility, Interest

  Flannery O'Connor (1988). “The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor”, p.199, Macmillan

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• A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Years, Trying, World

  Orhan Pamuk (2007). “Other Colors”, p.523, Vintage

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• A poem begins with a lump in the throat

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Poetry, Grace

  Robert Frost, Mark Richardson (2007). “The Collected Prose of Robert Frost”, p.84, Harvard University Press

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• We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

  Anne Lamott

  Sheep, Needs, Lice

  Anne Lamott (2007). “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life”, p.3, Anchor

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• Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Secret, Use, Toes

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• Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Thinking, Doe, Dollars

  Quoted in A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway (1966)

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• Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

  Octavia Butler

  Frustration, Profession, Paid

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• The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

  Mark Twain

  Character, Land, Together

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• A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

  Samuel Johnson

  Book, Men, Library Research

  Quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) (entry for 6 Apr. 1775)

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• It hinders the creative work of the mind if the intellect examines too closely the ideas as they pour in.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Creativity, Ideas, Creative

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• Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Real, Editing, Literature

  Charles Caleb Colton (1832). “Lacon: Or Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”

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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, California, People

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

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• In good writing, words become one with things.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing Words, Good Writing

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1992). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.376, University of Missouri Press

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• You fail only if you stop writing.

  Ray Bradbury

  Failing, Inspiration To Write, Great Writers

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• You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different.

  Neil Gaiman

  Beach, Sky, People

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• Write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

  Neil Gaiman

  Needs, Stories, Matter

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Neil Gaiman, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

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• All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

  Neil Gaiman

  Tasks, Fiction, Process

  "Where do you get your ideas?". Essay by Neil Gaiman, Personal website, www.neilgaiman.com.

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