- Grasp the subject, the words will follow. CATO THE ELDER ★
- One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other. CHARLES SIMIC
- The character’s attitude is more important than plot. STEPHEN J. CANNELL
- The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame. J. P. DONLEAVY
- There’s no point in writing about somebody unless they’re flawed. AARON SORKIN
- What keeps me writing is that I can only know through writing—my major sense organ is apparently a pencil. KAY RYAN ★
- A character is never the author who created him. ... Quite likely, however, an author may be all his characters simultaneously. CAMUS
- A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. SARAH WATERS
- A long project is like a secret houseguest, hidden in your study, waiting to be fed and visited. JOHN HOLLANDER
- All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant. ROBERT McKEE
- An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s. J.D. SALINGER
- Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line. THEODORE ROETHKE
- As far as I'm concerned, “whom” is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler. CALVIN TRILLIN
- Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well. CHARLES BUKOWSKI ★
- Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found. ELIZABETH BOWEN ★
- Commit yourself to the process, NOT the project. Don’t be afraid to write badly, everyone does. FRANK CONROY
- Cutting back is the crucial act that allows the vitality, precision and emotional heart of a piece of #writing to emerge. PAMELA ERENS
- Dare to tell the smallest of stories If you want to generate large emotions. WILLIAM ZINSSER ★
- Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand. HENRY MILLER __
- Don’t dump lazy sentences on your readers. If you do, they’ll walk away and turn on the TV. SEBASTIAN JUNGER
- Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last. RALPH KEYES ★
- Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity. WILLIAM ZINSSER ★
- Good writing is about telling the truth. ANNE LAMOTT ★
- Hating your own writing is necessary but not sufficient. HOWARD OGDEN ★
- I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all. E. B. WHITE ★
- I decided to write a children’s book so that children would have something to read on the plane. FRAN LEBOWITZ
- I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead. SAMUEL GOLDWYN
- I write for the same reason I breathe—because if I didn't, I would die. ISAAC ASIMOV ☆
- I write to understand as much as to be understood. ELLIE WIESEL ★
- I’m not happy when I’m writing, but I’m more unhappy when I’m not. FANNIE HURST
- If I see an ending, I can work backward. ARTHUR MILLER ★
- If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell? ADRIENNE RICH
- If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things. THOREAU
- If you can’t write clearly, you probably don’t think nearly as well as you think you do. KURT VONNEGUT
- If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist. NEIL GAIMAN
- It is bad manners to waste [the reader's] time. Therefore brevity first, then, clarity. F.L. LUCAS
- It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it. BORIS PASTERNAK
- Just as "no man is a hero to his valet," no writer is a hero to his or her proofreader. BEN SCHOTT
- Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings. STEPHEN KING
- Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. JANET FITCH
- Make writing a regular part of your daily routine...so that it feels more natural to write than not to. JENNIFER EGAN
- Never put off writing until you are better at it. GARY HENDERSON
- People rarely recognize themselves on the page. And if they do, they’re often flattered that a writer has paid attention. FRANCINE PROSE
- Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. ADRIENNE RICH
- Read everything. If you haven't read everything, you'll never be able to write anything. LEV GROSSMAN
- Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read. JOYCE CAROL OATES
- Sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person-and write to that one. JOHN STEINBECK
- Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft. JOHN CIARDI
- Storytelling alters the storyteller. And a story is altered by being told. MOHSIN HAMID
- The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone. MARTIN AMIS ★
- The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write. STEPHEN SONDHEIM
- The pen is mightier than the sword and considerably easier to write with. MARTY FELDMAN ★
- The simpler you say it, the more eloquent it is. AUGUST WILSON
- The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience. EMILY DICKINSON ★
- The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words. WILLIAM H. GASS ☆
- The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then listen for the reverberation. JAMES FENTON
- There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. JOHN ASHBERY
- There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army. JOHN ASHBERY
- Understand voice. Write the same sentence ten different ways by imitating the writing voices of ten different writers. PO BRONSON ★
- Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence. HONORÉ DE BALZAC ★
- Wear your heart on the page, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive. GORDON LISH
- Well-written prose seems preordained. OGDEN ★
- What I don't write is as important as what I write. JAMAICA KINCAID ★
- When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy. SENECA
- When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. RAYMOND CHANDLER ★
- When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature. ERNEST HEMINGWAY
- While I’m writing, I’m far away; when I come back, I’ve gone. PABLO NERUDA ★
- You write about the thing that sank its teeth into you and wouldn't let go. PAUL WEST ★
- Whether or not you write well, write bravely. BILL STOUT
- We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write. NEIL GAIMAN
- The arts are not decorative. They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves. EDWARD ALBEE
- The great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo. ALAN HOLLINGHURST ★
- There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. ROBERT GRAVES
- I have a faith in language. It’s the ultimate achievement that we as a species have evolved so far. W.S. MERWIN ★
- The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible. MICHAEL MORPURGO
- All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories. NEIL GAIMAN
- I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. ERNEST HEMINGWAY
- There are significant moments in everyone's day that can make literature. That's what you ought to write about. RAYMOND CARVER ★
- I never started from ideas but always from character. IVAN TURGENEV
- An idea is the worst thing to start building a poem from. LES MURRAY ★
- I am interested in making up a good case for distortion, as I am coming to believe it is the only way to make people see. FLANNERY O’CONNOR
- A line of dialogue is not clear enough if you need to explain how it's said. ELMORE LEONARD
- The best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it. DON ROFF
- It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy...for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval. GRAHAM GREENE
- People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently. ANNA QUINDLEN
- Some people are addicted to singing to themselves. It’s the same way with writing. ERSKINE CALDWELL ★
- An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way. CHARLES BUKOWSKI ★
may 31 2014 ∞
jan 16 2016 +
jan 16 2016 +