- A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God. - Sidney Sheldon
- There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. - Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
- You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. - Ray Bradbury
- I try to leave out the parts that people skip. - Elmore Leonard
- If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. - Toni Morrison
- Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. - Anton Chekhov
- Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. - Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. - Gene Fowler
- Every writer I know has trouble writing. - Joseph Heller
- The only cure for writer's block is insomnia. - Merit Antares
- The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. - Agatha Christie
- You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. And we edit to let the fire show through the smoke. - Arthur Polotnik
- The coroner will find ink in my veins and blood on my typewriter keys. - C. Astrid Weber
- It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write. - Sinclair Lewis
- Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. - Franz Kafka
- There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write. - Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
- Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life. - James Norman Hall
- Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all. - Franklin P. Adams, Half a Loaf, 1927
- A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. - Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, 1947
- Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. - George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1947
- One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. - Hart Crane
- Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. - Rainer Maria Rilke
- Every word written is a victory against death. - Michel Butor
- Neither man nor God is going to tell me what to write. - James T. Farrell
- Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity. - Natalia Laurila
- Writing is only boring to the people who are boring themselves. - Unknown
- The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. - William Faulkner
- I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within. - Gustave Flaubert
- Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. - E. L. Doctorow
- People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it. - Harlan Ellison
- Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. - Stephen King
- There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write. - Terry Pratchett
- If you are pointing out one of the things a story is about, then you are very probably right; if you are pointing out the only thing a story is about you are very probably wrong - even if you're the author. - Neil Gaiman
- Books are never finished, They are merely abandoned. - Oscar Wilde
- 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
- You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. - Jack London
may 2 2008 ∞
may 16 2008 +