- Benjamin Franklin: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
- Robert Graves: “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.”
- William Sansom: "A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes."
- Ray Bradbury: "You must write every single day of your life…You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads….may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world."
- TS Eliot: “Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.”
- Oscar Wilde: Be unpredictable. Wilde suggested that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
- Anton Chekhov: Show, don’t tell. This advice comes out of most every writing class taught. Chekhov said it most clearly when he said, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
- EB White: Just write. The author of Charlotte’s Web, one of the most beloved of children’s books, said that “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.” “Writers aren’t exactly people…they’re a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”
- Stephen King: “Read a lot and write a lot.” Reading and understanding different styles is integral to finding your own style.
- Flannery O’Connor: Sometimes you need to stir the emotions to be heard. “I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I’m afraid it will not be controversial.”
- Jessamyn West: “Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.”
- William Faulkner: “A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”
- Richard Bach: Never stop trying. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”
- Kurt Vonnegut: Vonnegut offers eight rules of writing a short story, including tips such as “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water” and “Every sentence must do one of two things–reveal character or advance the action.”
- Roald Dahl: From one of the most magical of storytellers: “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
- Jack Kerouac: Although Kerouac set down 30 tips, the gist of most of them is to know yourself and write for yourself with abandonment.
- Robert Louis Stevenson: “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.”
- Vladimir Nabokov: The careful construction of details can make all the difference in your writing. “Caress the detail, the divine detail.”
- Ernest Hemingway: "Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better." "The first draft of anything is sh*t." "Eschew the monumental. Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small ones." "Write the truest sentence you know."
- Virginia Woolf: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”
- John Cheever: “The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one’s life and discover one’s usefulness.”
- Agatha Christie: “The best time for planning a book is when you’re doing the dishes.”
- Charles Dickens: “An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
- Francis Bacon: “A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured, they seldom return.”
nov 3 2012 ∞
dec 16 2012 +
dec 16 2012 +